While modeling judicial decisions--especially for federal judges--is not a terribly new endeavor, a recent paper in the Journal of Law and Economics (2020), Younger Federal District Court Judges Favor Presidential Power, caught my eye. In it, the authors, Tom Campbell (Chapman) and Nathaniel Wilcox (Chapman--economics), assess how federal judges' votes on challenges to assertions of executive power evolve over a judge's life cycle. And they do so with an eye toward federal district court judges' potential appetite for judicial "promotion."
Drawing on district court opinions spanning from 1960 to 2015, what the authors find is that “The probability that district judges favor the executive (statistically) significantly increases with the hazard for elevation (and so declines with age) for all specifications with that regressor. Moreover, the estimated average marginal effects show that the estimated size of the effect is highly robust to the particular specification: in about one of every five cases, 50-year-old judges appear to rule differently than 65-year-old judges.” The paper's abstract follows.
"From 1960 to 2015, opinions of US federal district court judges (trial judges) in cases involving challenges to executive branch authority show that these judges favor executive authority less as they age. We suggest that district judges know that elevation to the federal circuit court of appeals becomes increasingly improbable, and hence have less reason to cooperate with the executive, with advancing age. Political variables, seniority of judges, and other variables introduced as extra regressors do not reverse this main result, nor does it appear to be the product of cohort effects or selection off the district court. When there are contemporaneous vacancies on their circuit courts, district judges in the 11 state circuits (but not the District of Columbia Circuit) are also more likely to favor the executive."
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