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The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequent actions by the Bush administration, remind us that the federal courts often are required to resolve questions of individual rights in lieu of foreign policy concerns. This paper explores judicial influences in foreign policy litigation across all three levels of the federal judiciary to determine whether judges systematically rule in favor of foreign affairs when confronted with civil liberties challenges. Using an original dataset of federal cases from 1946-2000, the paper provides evidence that the federal judiciary is extremely deferential to governmental authority in the conduct of foreign relations. While the federal judiciary is prone to support foreign policy interests, it is important to understand the conditions under which these judges will rule in favor of civil liberties claims. An important influence is the ideological preferences of judges. The empirical results indicate that more liberal judges -- as measured by partisan affiliations of the appointing president -- are more likely to render decisions in favor of civil liberties. This result holds for each level of the federal judiciary, although the results are more pronounced in the Supreme Court, less so for the Appeals Courts, and the weakest for District Courts. A second important influence involves the presence of a national security defense. The empirical data suggest that lower court judges are significantly affected by these situations; systematically ruling in favor of foreign affairs. However, Supreme Court justices do not respond in a similar fashion; the presence of a specific national security defense is not significantly related to judicial decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the hierarchical relationship between the district courts and the courts of appeals influence decision-making at the trial level? Stated another way, are district court judges constrained by the appeals courts, according to the tenets of principal agency theory? Do these judges anticipate responses by appellate panels and condition their decisions based on these expectations? Using an original dataset of foreign policy cases from 1946-2000 and incorporating a strategic choice statistical framework to analyze a formal model, I discover that the District Courts are not constrained by the anticipated responses of the Appeals Courts. Whether one examines District Courts in isolation from other tribunals or within a hierarchical structure, conclusions regarding ideological voting remain consistent: Democratic judges are more likely to rule in favor of civil liberties than their Republican colleagues. Thus, the hierarchical structure of the federal judiciary does not appear to be a significant constraint to the District Courts as it seemingly is for the Courts of Appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing theoretical debate within the literature concerning the extent to which lower court judges anticipate how their decisions might be reviewed by the Supreme Court on appeal. Beginning with Songer, Segal, and Cameron (1994), and relying primarily on a principal-agent framework, scholars have produced conflicting evidence on whether the institutional structure of the judiciary impacts the decision-making process of lower court judges. We argue that one of the reasons for the theoretical disagreement is that previous analyses do not directly test whether lower court judges engage in strategic behavior. Our paper engages this discussion through the empirical test of a formal model depicting the relationship between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court in a variety of issue areas. Using a dataset of appellate cases (from 1953 to 2002) that have been reviewed by the Supreme Court, plus a random sample of appellate cases that were not reviewed, we argue that the current literature on judicial hierarchies is limited because scholars have not modeled specifically the potential strategic interdependence between court levels. Our analysis borrows a statistical model from the IR literature on strategic anticipation and adapts it to the judicial hierarchy to demonstrate the impact of potential Supreme Court responses on the decision calculus of appellate judges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]