Among political scientists who study the courts, explanation of judicial behavior is the issue that receives the most attention. That issue is also a major concern in legal scholarship. Of course, judicial behavior takes many forms and occurs in many settings. The aspect of judicial behavior on which scholars typically concentrate is the decisions that appellate courts (and especially the Supre...

The quality of a state’s judicial system is an important determinant of economic growth and vitality. The decisions made within state judicial systems affect the degree to which private property rights are well-defined and enforced, which is an essential building block for entrepreneurial activity and economic growth. The key link between free-market institutions, such as secure property rights...

Active judges are likely to face numerous work-related experiences (e.g., traumatic cases) that affect performance of their occupational duties. Three occupational experiences (secondary traumatic stress [STS], safety concerns, and burnout) are outlined and applied to the judiciary. Results from nine case study interviews conducted in a single jurisdiction among a homogeneous cohort suggest tha...

Judges are afforded considerable discretion in decision-making. Through their exercise of discretion, judges construct society's notion of crime and justice. This study examined 61 lay judges' bail decision-making in the English criminal justice system. The law states that in particular cases decisions to grant bail or remand in custody should be based on the risk of a defendant absconding, off...

This thesis examines the factors that influence perceptions of judicial corruption. A statistical analysis using data from such sources as Transparency International, the World Bank, and Freedom House demonstrates that aspects of accountability (the ability to remove judges) and transparency (freedom of the press) are only weakly related to perceptions of judicial corruption. A systematic count...

Using a new dataset capturing the ideological positioning of nearly half a million U.S. judges and lawyers, we present evidence showing how ideology affects the selection of judges across federal and state judiciaries. We document that the higher the court, the more it deviates ideologically from the ideology of attorneys, suggesting ideology plays a strong role in judicial selection. We also s...

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be t...

The degree to which discrimination causes the large racial disparities in the criminal justice system is a long-standing and difficult empirical question. This paper studies a decision in which the influence of race on prosecutors is directly observed: the process of obtaining judicial approval to conduct wiretap surveillance. The Department of Justice requires that federal prosecutors obtain i...