Comment on Recent Judicial Decisions

Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings...

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions∗

Racial and gender disparities are prevalent in the criminal justice system, but the sources of these disparities remain largely unknown. This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to these disparities using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican appointed judges sentence black de...

A Comment on the Relationship between Judicial Salary and Judicial Quality

Professor Scott Baker was kind enough to present his empirical research on the relationship between judicial salary and judicial quality1 to the Law and Economics Workshop run by Professor Keith Hylton2 and me last fall and I am honored to be able to comment on it today. It is part of a growing body of literature in law that tries to shed light on important issues through statistical analysis. ...

Decision Rules in a Judicial Hierarchy: Comment

Recent Decisions