Corey Rayburn Yung (The John Marshall Law School) has posted How Judges Decide: A Multidimensional Empirical Typology of Judicial Styles in the Federal Courts on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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This article calls into question fundamental premises related to the study of judicial decisionmaking by political science and law scholars. The three dominant explanations for how judges make decisions (the attitudinal, strategic, and legal models) have each relied on three highly questionable assumptions: 1) Homogeneity – judges should be studied as a monolithic group that utilizes similar, if not identical, approaches to judging; 2) Unidimensionality – judges decide cases based upon a single goal that should be measured along a single dimension; 3) Isolation – each level of judges should be gauged independently of other judges.
In the alternative, this article offers a typological approach which recognizes judicial heterogeneity, multidimensional behavior, and interconnectedness among judges at different levels within the judiciary. The study utilizes new data of over 10,000 cases from eleven Courts of Appeals in 2008 to create measures for judicial activism, ideology, independence, and partisanship. Based upon those four metrics, statistical cluster analysis is used to identify nine distinct judging styles: Trailblazing, Consensus Building, Stalwart, Regulating, Steadfast, Collegial, Pragmatic, Minimalistic, Error Correcting. These types provide a much more nuanced and fuller account of how judges actually decide cases.
Further, the typological model is tested against traditional ideology-based explanations of judicial behavior using a separate new dataset of over 25,000 cases from the same eleven circuits in 2009. Notably, the judicial types prove substantially better in forecasting decisions by judges. The increased ability to predict dissents is particularly significant as the typology model is accurate in 72 to 90% of cases. In contrast, the ideology-based model shows just modest improvement over random guesses. The study, using regression analysis, also identifies statistically significant relationships between background traits and the nine judicial types. Among other findings, ranking of law school attended, circuit, and senior status all are correlated with a judge’s style type. The article concludes with ideas for new directions for empirical research that move beyond the stagnant models that have reigned supreme in recent studies.
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