Search results for ""Author Lee Epstein""

This excellent research review contains the very best studies that take an economic approach to the study of judicial behaviour. The authors hail from the disciplines of business, economics, history, law, and political science, and the topics they cover are equally varied. Subjects include the judges' motivations, judicial independence, precedent, judging on collegial courts and in the hierarchy of justice and the relationship between judges and the other government actors.

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Scores of works have made important contributions to the study of courts and judges but far fewer are sufficiently powerful to alter perspectives about entire areas of study. The articles in this volume do just that. They are, to be sure, a rather diverse set covering four substantive concerns - judicial selection and retention, judicial decision making, constraints on judicial power and the role of courts in democracies - but all have played crucial roles in shaping or changing the way we think about courts and judges.

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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 the authors' 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.

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