Judicial Opinions and Appellate Advocacy in Federal Courts - One Judge's Views

Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts

Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a “case-...

Appellate Court Decision Making in NLRB Cases

Abstract: In this article, I review the decisions of the appellate courts in National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) cases over a twenty year period, 1994 to 2014, to ascertain what political, economic and legal factors impact judicial decision making. Unlike many other analyses of appellate decision making, this study makes a deliberate effort to take into account legal and procedural differen...

Bureaucratic Justice : an Early Warning *

To accommodate the staggering increase in federal litigation that has occurred in recent years, the federal judicial process has been gradually, but significantly, transformed. The number of federal judges has dramatically increased at both the trial and appellate levels.' The number of law clerks and "staff attorneys" employed in the courts of appeals also has grown dramatically.2 Moreover, an...

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: A Pragmatic Approach to Nonprecedential Opinions in the Federal Appellate Courts

Is Justice Really Blind? Race and Appellate Review in U.S. Courts

In this paper, I use two new data sets to demonstrate that black federal judges are consistently overturned on appeal more often than white judges. The racial gap is robust and persists after taking into account previous professional and judicial experience, educational backgrounds, qualification ratings assigned by the American Bar Association, and differences in partisanship. This study is th...