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The Behavior of Federal Judges : A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice / Lee Epstein, William M Landes, Richard A Posner.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublisher: Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2013]Copyright date: ©2012Description: 1 online resource (446 p.) : 20 graphs, 100 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780674049895
  • 9780674067325
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 347.7314 21
LOC classification:
  • KF5130 .E67 2013eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- General Introduction -- Technical Introduction -- 1. A Realistic Theory of Judicial Behavior -- 2. The Previous Empirical Literature -- 3. The Supreme Court -- 4. The Courts of Appeals -- 5. The District Courts and the Selection Effect -- 6. Dissents and Dissent Aversion -- 7. The Questioning of Lawyers at Oral Argument -- 8. The Auditioners -- Conclusion: The Way Forward -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Summary: Summary: Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In their view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional "legalist" theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780674067325

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- General Introduction -- Technical Introduction -- 1. A Realistic Theory of Judicial Behavior -- 2. The Previous Empirical Literature -- 3. The Supreme Court -- 4. The Courts of Appeals -- 5. The District Courts and the Selection Effect -- 6. Dissents and Dissent Aversion -- 7. The Questioning of Lawyers at Oral Argument -- 8. The Auditioners -- Conclusion: The Way Forward -- Acknowledgments -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In their view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional "legalist" theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)