How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.

* *Donald P. Klekamp Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati. The authors would like to thank Greg Caldeira, Rafael Gely, Arthur Hellman, Bruce Kobayashi, Larry Ribstein, James Walker, and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments; Jennifer Bergeron, Susan Luken, and Andrea Myers for excellent research assistance; and Pegeen Bassett for outstanding government document assistance. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Gary King for advising us on the methodological challenges posed by our study. Any remaining errors are our own.

Law school professors control the production of lawyers and influence the evolution of law. Understanding who is hired as a tenure-track law professor is of clear importance to debates about the state of legal education in the United States. But while opinions abound on the law school hiring process, little is empirically known about what explains success in the market for law professors. Using a unique and extensive data set of survey responses from candidates in the 2007-2008 legal academic labor market, we examine the factors that influence which candidates are interviewed and ultimately hired by law schools. We find that law schools appear open to nontraditional candidates in the early phases of the hiring process but when it comes to the ultimate decision-hiring-they focus on candidates who look like current law professors.

No abstract

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation may transfer factually related actions filed in different federal districts to a single judge for consolidated pretrial litigation. This transferee judge has significant discretion over the management of the litigation, including ruling on dispositive pretrial motions. Nearly all cases are resolved without returning to the original district court. Thus, as a practical matter, the MDL Panel controls where these disputes will be litigated. And, the MDL Panel has substantial discretion in making that decision. In its first 44 years of existence, the Panel has transferred and consolidated nearly 400,000 lawsuits, including high‐profile securities and derivative lawsuits, large‐scale consumer actions, and mass torts involving products liability claims, common disasters, and air crashes. The Panel's transfer ruling has never been overturned. The current study provides the first systematic and comprehensive empirical investigation of the Panel's decision to transfer and consolidate pending federal civil lawsuits, examining the rationale for transfer and for the selection of a specific district court and judge to handle the consolidated litigation. We find that the Panel grants most motions to transfer and consolidate, but exercises meaningful discretion in choosing where and by whom the cases will be adjudicated. The MDL Panel is much more likely to assign cases to a district court where a current panelist sits and that is supported by at least one defendant and to a district judge who currently serves on the Panel. Thus, the composition of the Panel has a meaningful effect on where and how large‐scale litigation will be resolved.