The Impact of Legal Schools of Thought

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the e ects of legal schools of thought on appellate jurisprudence and criminal sentencing decisions. We construct measures of the in uence of a major school of conservative legal thought Law and Economics using the linguistic features of judicial opinions and attendance at a law-and-economics training program. We examine the impact of law-and-economics on decision-making in the appellate decisions of U.S. Circuit Court Judges and the criminal-sentencing decisions of U.S. District Court Judges. Random assignment of cases allows us to control for other court-level and caselevel factors in uencing those decisions. We show that appellate-court judges who use law-and-economics language or attend law-and-economics training are more likely to issue and support conservative rulings (even controlling for political party). In particular, they tend to rule against regulatory agencies; in criminal cases, they tend to reject appeals by defendants and are more likely to mention deterrence in their opinions. Trial-court judges who attend a law-and-economics training program are more likely to impose longer criminal sentences. This e ect is largest when judges have more discretion over sentencing.