Responding to my previous post, Ted Eisenberg notes:
"Brian Fitzpatrick’s study of
class actions (forthcoming in 7:4 JELS) finds no evidence that the fee award
was associated with the political affiliation of the judge who made the
award. This result is similar to the finding in Individual Justice or
Collective Legal Mobilization? Employment Discrimination Litigation in the Post
Civil Rights United States, by Laura Beth Nielsen, Robert L. Nelson, and Ryon
Lancaster, recently published in 7 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 175 (2010), which
also found no political effect in an excellent dataset of employment
discrimination cases, which, unlike most studies (but like Fitzpatrick’s
study), included the mass of settlements. Since settlement is the modal
outcome for civil litigation, including settled cases in studies of judge
effects is important. The Nielsen et al. results echo the absence of judge
effects in an earlier civil rights study, that included settlements, by Orley
Ashenfelter, Stewart Schwab, and me. See Politics and the Judiciary: The
Influence of Judicial Background on Case Outcomes, 24 J. Legal Studies 257-81
(1995).
This raises the following
question: Is there a large-scale study of trial court level civil litigation,
that includes settlements, that finds political or other judge effects?"
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