It is fitting that Rutgers Law School has inaugurated this lecture series honoring Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub. The school represents the state's commitment to maintain the excellence of the bar, which is perhaps the most effective means for maintaining the excellence of the bench, the twin goals which the late Chief Justice valued above all. As a holder of the office to which he brought nat...

We use an agency model to analyze the impact of judicial review on the incentives of elected leaders to “posture” by enacting bold but ill-advised policies. We find that judicial review may exacerbate posturing by rescuing leaders from the consequences of unwise policies, but may also discourage posturing by alerting voters to unjustified government action. We further find that judges will defe...

Federal appellate courts have devised several criteria to help judges distinguish between reliable and unreliable scientific evidence. The best known are the U.S. Supreme Court's criteria offered in 1993 in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. This article focuses on another criterion, offered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that instructs judges to assign lower credibility to "l...

No. 1539825 (Dec. 18, 2009), http://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1539825. 11. Seth S. Andersen, Judicial Retention Evaluation Programs, 34 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1375 (2001). The State of Utah has recently introduced several innovations to its judicial performance evaluation program. Since the 1960s, such programs have been used in a growing number of states to inform decisions about...

M any randomized controlled intervention trials have demonstrated that lowering glycemia (1,2), LDL cholesterol (3), and blood pressure (4) will markedly benefit the complications from diabetes. Based on these data, the American Diabetes Association has recommended the following targets for glycemic, lipid, and blood pressure outcome measures, A1C 7.0%, LDL cholesterol 100 mg/dl, and blood pres...

Existing studies of judicial decisionmaking have found that elected judges are more likely to dissent and to oppose judges from the same party. These findings are explained by elected judges having stronger preferences for risk or being more independent. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation: judges’ efforts to be retained should yield different patterns of opposition among judges f...

American legal realism was committed to examining legal reasoning in terms of the actual experiences of judges. Because the realist project sought to use social science tools to examine human nature, the contemporary rise of cognitive neuroscience provides an occasion for reexamining legal realism’s foundational critique of the law. Realism’s attempt to examine “the actual facts of judicial beh...