Abstract: ABSTRACT-This Article calls into question the fundamental premises of models of judicial decisionmaking utilized by legal and political science scholars. In the place of the predominant theories, I offer a new approach to understanding judicial behavior which recognizes judicial heterogeneity, multidimensional behavior, and interconnectedness among judges at different levels within the judiciary. The study utilizes a unique dataset of over 30,000 judicial votes from eleven courts of appeals in 2008, yielding statistically independent measures for judicial activism, ideology, independence, and partisanship. Based upon those four metrics, statistical cluster analysis is used to identify nine statistically distinct judging styles: Trailblazing, Consensus Building, Stalwart, Regulating, Steadfast, Collegial, Incrementalist, Minimalist, and Error Correcting. These judicial style types offer a fuller account of judicial behavior than any of the prior models utilized by scholars.INTRODUCTIONOn June 29, 2011, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel issued an eagerly awaited decision in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).1 In a split vote among the three jurists, Judges Boyce Martin and Jeffrey Sutton held that the ACA was constitutional under existing precedent related to the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses.2 Scholars, pundits, and other court watchers were shocked at Judge Sutton's vote to uphold the liberal law because he was known as a prominent judge appointed by a Republican President.3 As Professor Arthur Hellman stated after the panel's decision: Of all the federal appeals judges, Sutton is one of the last I would have expected to uphold this.4Just as the qualitative impressions of Judge Sutton led commentators astray, the three dominant quantitative models of judicial decisionmaking failed to predict his vote.5 The attitudinal model, which contends that political ideology guides judicial votes, could not rationalize the liberal vote from a conservative judge, regardless of how ideology is measured.6 The strategic model, which holds that judges issue opinions based upon institutional and personal considerations, was similarly stifled, as Judge Sutton had seemingly sacrificed his chance of being nominated to the Supreme Court by a Republican President.7 And the formal model, which argues that neutral judges render decisions by determinate rules, could not easily explain why the three judges had not reached the same conclusion about the relevant precedent.8 Although ideology alone was successful in predicting the votes of all of the Supreme Court Justices except Chief Justice John Roberts in their review of the ACA,9 such a simple predictor has repeatedly failed to explain the overwhelming majority of votes by judges on lower federal courts.10 So, why were all of the empirical models wrong in predicting the Sixth Circuit's decision?11The fault lies in the fact that the dominant models of judicial12 decisionmaking rely on three basic dubious assumptions that have been neither empirically tested nor validated for lower court judges:1. Homogeneity-judges should be understood as a monolithic group that utilizes similar, if not identical, approaches to judging.132. Unidimensionality-judges decide cases based upon [ideology, strategy, law] and [ideology, strategy, law] should be measured along a single continuum.143. Isolation-each judge or level of judges should be gauged independently of other actors in the judicial system.15Based upon those assumptions, existing research presumes that Judge Sutton would behave like every other judge based upon the single dimension of ideology, strategy, or law without any regard to the particulars of the district court judgment under review. These tenuous premises have been at the center of empirical research in large part because of the available data. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 9
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