Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be ‘fixed.’ Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show that there are large differences in mean awards and win rates across juries and judges. But if the type...

This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court’s decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial c...

Recent empirical scholarship that shows that judges decide cases in a manner that is consistent with their political biases has motivated a stream of proposals for reform, including judicial term limits, limitations on judicial review of statutes and agency actions, revision of the judicial appointments process, and mandatory mixed party representation on judicial panels. However, these proposa...

In this paper, I employ an LDA model in order to classify 20,227 judicial decisions from the Philippine Supreme Court during the 1996-2012. I begin by introducing the Philippine Supreme Court, its jurisdiction, and significant controversies during this time period. Next, I explain the problems that would arise from hand-coding these judicial decisions. I then explain the Latent Dirichlet Alloca...

The philosophical underpinnings of youth courts rest on the notion that youths are less culpable and more reformable than adults. Ideally, when sentencing youth crime, some scholars argue that judges should engage youthful offenders in moral communication to elicit change. But do they? What more generally do judges say to the youths? This paper analyzes the frequency and content of judicial cen...

In February 2007, the American Bar Association (“ABA”) revised its Model Code of Judicial Conduct, including significant changes in both form and substance.1 The adoption of the 2007 Judicial Code concluded a three-and-a-half year revision process by the ABA Joint Commission to Evaluate the Model Judicial Code (“Commission”).2 During the revision process, the Commission solicited comment on a n...