Federal Judges and Quasi-Judges

More Women Named Federal Judges

Perhaps We Should Pay Federal Circuit Judges More

Scott Baker’s article takes a creative approach to the question of whether the federal judiciary should receive a pay raise and concludes that the data counsel otherwise.1 While I am a great advocate of empirical analysis to inform questions such as this, and Professor Baker may have done the best job possible with the available measures, I fear that this study contributes little to the debate ...

Evaluating Judges

Much of the interest in empirical studies of judges lies in the comparison of actual to ideal behavior. When we ask what makes a good judge or whether a judge rightly decided a case, we implicitly compare the judge's decisions to a normative standard. In some instances, the content of the normative standard is uncontroversial and its application straightforward. Hence, a trial judge who sentenc...

Judges, Expertise, and Analogy

Political scientists have shown that one can anticipate how a judge will decide a case more often than chance, or a reading of the facts, might allow by using various predictors such as party affiliation, gender, or the judge’s own decisions on earlier similar cases. The simplest explanation for such behavior is that judges first decide what they want the outcome of the case to be, then go back...

Judging the judges: Evaluating the performance of international gymnastics judges

Judging a gymnastics routine is a noisy process, and the performance of judges varies widely. The International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG), in collaboration with Longines and the Université de Neuchâtel, is designing and implementing an improved statistical engine to analyze the performance of gymnastics judges during and after major competitions like the Olympic Games and the World Champio...