Dissensus on the Courts of Appeals

Bill Ford and I have just finished our working draft of a paper entitled An Empirical Analysis of Dissensus on the United States Courts of Appeals (now available on SSRN), a follow-up piece to an earlier paper forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review, looking at what factors impact (dis)agreement rates on the courts of appeals.  We would appreciate any feedback on the paper.

The Abstract:

"Judges often emphasize that decision-making on the courts of appeals is a product of collegial deliberation among judges. Many factors may help promote judicial collegiality or create dissensus in the courts. We examine aggregate disagreement - or dissensus - on the United States Court of Appeals for the First, Seventh, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits and attempt to explain dissensus as a product of several variables: the ideological makeup of the court, the size of the court, the addition of new members to the court, the chief judge's years of experience, the number of judges with trial court experience, workload, and a measure of aggregate co-tenure, which is the average number of years of shared service on the court for each pair of judges on the court. Using both pooled and individual OLS estimates for the four circuits, we find only limited evidence that these variables contribute to the aggregate levels of disagreement on these courts."

Comments

[Tracy Lightcap]

Sorry, haven't got time to read the papers.

From the abstract: two comments.

1. Did you disaggregate the issues when you looked at dissensus? Some issues on appeal don't activate the kinds of issues that ideological models look at. (Ah, there's a story. I have a theory about this. If you want the paper e-mail me.) It might repay a more detailed look.

2. The first thing that came to mind when I looked at the abstract is that you weren't tapping the prior career of the judges. If you look at Tate's work way back when, you'll find that one factor that can make a difference is, for example, whether a judge was a prosecutor or not. "Ah," I hear you say, "We've covered that with ideological preferences!" If we were looking at the Nine, I'd agree. When you look at CoA's, however, you have to take that old saw local legal culture into consideration. I'm betting that there is less ideological variation among CoA judges. That's when career differences could be worth looking into.

Well, just some thoughts.