front cover of The Behavior of Federal Judges
The Behavior of Federal Judges
A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice
Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 2012

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

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Federal Judges
The Appointing Process
Harold W. Chase
University of Minnesota Press, 1972

Federal Judges was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Despite the importance of federal judges in the system of American government, relatively little scholarly attention has been directed toward the process of appointing these judges -- how it operates and what types of individuals become judges. Professor Chase analyzes and evaluates the appointing system and makes some provocative proposals for changes which he believes would improve and strengthen the federal judicial system.

The study is concerned with the appointing process as it applies to federal judges below the level of the Supreme Court who receive lifetime appointments. These are the judges who serve in what are known as Article III courts, the courts constituted by Congress in accordance with Article III of the Constitution. They include courts of appeals, district courts, the court of claims, the court of customs and patent appeals, and the customs court.

For this study the author had access to Department of Justice records, and he observed for several months the negotiations and discussions in the department involving the selection of judges by President Kennedy's administration. He conducted extensive interviews with officials in the Kennedy administration as well as with officials in the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations who played leading roles in the appointment of judges. In addition, he interviewed many judges, lawyers, newsmen, and political leaders, as well as a sampling of U.S. senators and most of the recent chairmen of the American Bar Association's Committee on Federal Judiciary.

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