Modeling Collegial Courts (3): Judicial Objectives, Opinion Content, Voting and Adjudication Equilibria

Cameron, Charles M.; Kornhauser, Lewis A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1296071

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…(From the statement submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary by Justice Ruth Ginsburg.) This is also emphasized by Cameron and Kornhauser (2008), among others.…”

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confidence: 64%

To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

2011

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In this paper, we address empirically the trade-offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians. In order to do this, we need to map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce. We do this by specifying a collective decision-making model, and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types. We focus on criminal decisions across US states' Supreme Courts. We find that justices that are shielded from voters' influence ("bureaucrats") on average (i) have better information, (ii) are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and (iii) are more effective (make less mistakes) than their elected counterparts ("politicians"). We evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule.

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“…(From the statement submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary by Justice Ruth Ginsburg.) This is also emphasized by Cameron and Kornhauser (2008), among others.…”

mentioning

confidence: 64%

To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

2011

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“…Appendix: Additional Tables 33 For more details on the distinction between case disposition and rule creation see Cameron and Kornhauser (2008), where case disposition and rule creation are linked because of the assumption that justices care about the extent of support their opinion attracts.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…From the statement submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary by Justice Ruth Ginsburg. 2 See alsoCameron and Kornhauser (2008) andLax and Cameron (2007). 3 Such models of voting have been proposed in the information aggregation literature on voting.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Value of Information in the Court: Get it Right, Keep it Tight

Iaryczower

Shum

2012

American Economic Review

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We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice votes differently from how she would have voted without case-specific information. Our results suggest a sizable value of information: in 44 percent of cases, justices' initial leanings are changed by their personal assessments of the case. Our results also confirm the increased politicization of the Supreme Court in the last quarter century. Counterfactual simulations provide implications for institutional design. (JEL D72, D82, D83, K10)

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Optimal Patent Jurisprudence

Baker

Mezzetti

2009

SSRN Journal

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Modeling Collegial Courts (3): Judicial Objectives, Opinion Content, Voting and Adjudication Equilibria

Cited by 7 publications

References 17 publications

To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

The Value of Information in the Court: Get it Right, Keep it Tight

Optimal Patent Jurisprudence

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