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Yung on Empirical Study of Ideology in the United States Court of Appeals

By Lawrence Solum

Corey Rayburn Yung (The John Marshall Law School) has posted Judged by the Company You Keep: An Empirical Study of the Ideologies of Judges on the United States Courts of Appeals (Boston College Law Review, Vol. 51, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

While there has been an explosion of empirical legal scholarship about the federal judiciary, with a particular focus on judicial ideology, the question remains: how do we know what the ideology of a judge actually is? For federal courts below the United States Supreme Court, legal academics and political scientists have offered only very crude proxies to identify the ideologies of judges. This article attempts to cure this deficiency in empirical research about the federal courts by introducing a new technique for measuring the ideology of judges based upon judicial behavior in the United States Courts of Appeals.

This study measures ideology, not by subjectively coding the ideological direction of case outcomes, but by determining the degree to which federal appellate judges agree and disagree with their liberal and conservative colleagues at both the appellate and district court levels. Further, as part of this unique multi-court-level measure, important inter-court factors such as standard of review are incorporated into the metric. The measure proposed and applied herein (the ?Ideology Score?) is based upon opinions derived from or leading to over 30,000 judicial votes issued in 2008 by eleven Courts of Appeals. Utilizing the Ideology Scores, this article includes a scale of the ideology of 138 federal appellate level judges.

Further, through linear and logistic regression analysis, several important findings related to the Ideology Scores emerged. First, the Ideology Scores in this article offer substantial improvements in predicting case outcomes over the leading measures of ideology. Second, there were very different levels and heterogeneity of ideology among the judges on the studied circuits. Third, while the data did support the conventional wisdom that President Ronald Reagan appointed uniquely ideological judges, it did not lend credence to the popular view that George W. Bush?s appointees were similarly ideological. Fourth, in general judges appointed by Republican Presidents were more ideological than those appointed by Democratic Presidents. Fifth, attendance at a higher ranked law school was strongly correlated with liberalism on the bench for appointments of both Republican and Democratic Presidents. Sixth, prior work experience in the government (outside of the judiciary) indicated liberal judicial voting.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 04, 2010 (boomark / email).