Trial Court Experience and Appellate Court Decisions

In The Effect of Trial-Judge Experience on Appellate Decisionmaking Behavior, Nick Linder and John Niles (both at Duke) report results from a study that analyzes "3,222 appellate votes from criminal sentencing cases that came before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit between 2003 and 2007, " and controls for an array of factors, including trial-judge experience, that might influence appellate decisionmaking behavior.

The authors find that although prior experience as a state trial judge causes an appellate judge to be more likely to vote to affirm, neither experience as a federal trial judge nor experience from both state and federal trial benches has any statistically significant effect. Finally, the effect of state trial-judge experience diminishes when lower courts have greater discretion.

Comments

[Alan E. Dunne]

The authors explained in correspondence that they controlled for a judge's own age but not that of his colleagues on a panel(in contrast to what they did with other "judge" variables) because the found little evidence a judge's age affected the judge's colleagues on a panel. This suggests that which charcteristics of a judge affect their decisions but not those of their panel colleagues might be worth exploring, versus those that do both and perhaps versus characteristics of a judge that do not affect their own decisions but do affect those of their panel colleagues. How far the judge's own decisionmaking on the panel sercves as a mediator variable of course affects all this.