What Do Federal District Judges Want? An Analysis of Publications, Citations, and Reversals

Abstract

We report evidence from a dataset of federal district judges from 2001 to 2002 that district judges adjust their opinion-writing practices to minimize their workload while maximizing their reputation and chance for elevation to a higher court. District judges in circuits with politically uniform circuit judges are better able to predict what opinions will get affirmed by the circuit court, leading to higher publication rates and a higher affirmance rate. In contrast, district judges in circuits with politically diverse circuit judges are less able to predict the preferences of the reviewing circuit court panel, leading district judges to publish fewer but higher quality opinions in an effort to maximize their affirmance rate. IntroductionA large literature has found that Supreme Court justices and federal appellate judges decide cases at least partly on the basis of ideological preferences. Scholarship on district court judges has been less extensive, and its results less consistent. Some research finds that district court judges are influenced by ideological preferences, especially in sentencing and cases involving salient topics, but other research finds little or no correlation between ideological preferences and decisions (Rowland and Carp 1983;Rowland and Carp 1996;Ashenfelter, Eisenberg and Schwab 1995).The most plausible explanation for these different results is that district judges are more closely supervised than are judges higher up in the court hierarchy. Supreme Court justices do not face review and appellate court judges face review in only a tiny fraction of the cases they decide. By contrast, district judges are routinely subject to appellate review. Reversal can be a burden for district judges, requiring them sometimes to conduct new trials and usually to hear new motions. At the same time, pressure is put on district judges to clear their dockets-to decide cases expeditiously. Reversal is also potentially embarrassing and detrimental to a trial judge's prospects for promotion to the appeals courts. Judges on the appeals courts, by contrast, have little prospect of promotion.We suspect that district judges care as much about political outcomes as appellate judges do, but cannot advance their ideological preferences because they are subject to appellate review.Thus, we hypothesize that district judges care about minimizing their workload and maximizing their reputation (and hopes for elevation to an appellate court) by avoiding appellate reversal.2 If 2 The literature on judging frequently mentions the aversion of judges to reversal (Higgins and Rubin 1980; Drahozal 1988;Watson 1988). Research on the appeals courts, however, has found little evidence of reversal aversion (Klein and Hume 2003;Cross 2007; Songer, Humpries and Sarver 2003). With respect to the district 4 district judges want to avoid reversal, and appellate judges decide cases on the basis of political preferences, then district judges will decide cases on the basis of the political preferences of appellate judges. When d...

Getting Their Way: Bias and Deference to Trial Courts

“…Indeed, trial judges dislike reversals for reasons beyond their impact on case outcomes (see Choi, Gulati, and Posner 2012;George and Yoon 2003). First, she suffers a cost k > 0 whenever she is reversed by the appellate court.…”

“…This could represent a judge's career concerns 6 or the extra costs imposed by having to reopen a case and handle the issues raised by the appellate court's reversal. Indeed, trial judges dislike reversals for reasons beyond their impact on case outcomes (see Choi, Gulati, and Posner 2012;George and Yoon 2003). For example, a judge's reversal rates are routinely considered by senators deciding whether to confirm a judge who is being promoted.…”

After the Override: An Empirical Analysis of Shadow Precedent

“…Both district court and circuit court judges generally comply with Supreme Court precedent that is clearly on point (for example, Kim 2007;Klein 2002;Songer and Sheehan 1990). Where application of a precedent is unclear, however, studies suggest that judges' own ideology (Boyd and Spriggs 2009;Sunstein et al 2006), their network of peer judges (Choi and Gulati 2008;Choi, Gulati, and Posner 2012), the composition of the panel with whom they sit (Sunstein et al 2006;Kim 2009), the presumed ideological preferences of reviewing courts ( Randazzo 2008;Westerland et al 2010), and changes in personnel on the Supreme Court (Benjamin and Vanberg 2016) all may play a role. There has been relatively little research into how lower courts implement Supreme Court decisions that overrule earlier decisions.…”

Judicial Independence, Judges’ Incentives and Efficiency

“…Taha (2004) adopted the utility-maximizing model, by focusing on US federal judges and their publishing decision habits, with results that confirm the economic orientation of judicial choices. Landes et al (1998), andChoi et al (2010) for the United States, Ramseyer (2012) for Japan and Schneider (2005) for Germany have stressed the role of judges' educational background (as a proxy for their intellectual ability) in explaining their performance. Christensen and Szmer (2012) show evidence that judicial delay, the most evident symptom of a court's "pathology" (at least from ordinary people's perspective), is mitigated by judges' expertise.…”