Search

This study offers a preliminary look at the impact of gender effects and consciousness-raising in the Canadian intermediate appellate courts. This analysis is one component of a larger project that examines the impact of trailblazer women cross-nationally within intermediate appellate courts. In this preliminary work, we investigate the impact of judge gender on decisions of the intermediate appellate courts in five of the largest provinces in Canada between 1986 and 2010. The results support our theoretical intuitions on gender consciousness-raising by female judges in criminal and civil liberties cases. We find differences in female decision patterns in criminal cases, but not in equality and privacy cases, where prior research suggests some differences in decision-making patterns might exist. We hypothesize that these findings might be due to diminishing effects of gender differences over time, and thus, we plan to extend our time period of analysis in order to explore gender effects by trailblazers, similar to Moyer and Haire's (2015) study of trailblazer women on the U.S. courts of appeal. The proposed research project, currently in progress, will build on this study and an existing study of the U.S. courts (Masood and Songer 2013), by examining trailblazer effects in the U.S., Canada, and England intermediate appellate courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This proposal shows how precedent may have a major role in how judges determine their votes on state supreme courts. While much has been written of late on legal models of judicial decision-making, this particular has not been addressed vis a vis state supreme courts. We show several models that include varying attitudinal and/or strategic and/or institutional theories of analyzing courts, while including several variables to show legal importance in terms of how individual justices vote. By doing so, one can increase the number of connections to issues such as federalism, and to examine issues across states, to analyze for particular elements that vary among states, generally considered to be term lengths, whether state supreme courts have docket control, and whether judges are elected in that state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do we witness variation in the level of judicial attention to rights litigation across countries and over time? Traditional explanations emphasize the constitutional recognition of rights, judicial leadership, and the development in society of a sophisticated 'support structure for legal mobilization,' as key covariates of these phenomena. Yet, there is a dearth of quantitative empirical analyses that evaluate these explanations comparatively, and actually test their relative influence on trends of rights litigation and protection. Perhaps the most important lacuna in this regard is an assessment of the influence of institutional conditions and modifications in bringing about or facilitating the transformation of the rights scene. To contribute to closing this gap, this paper assesses the influence of such factors on changes in the presence of rights litigation in the dockets of the High Courts of four established democracies with Common Law systems: Australia, Britain, Canada and the U.S. To this purpose, we perform time series analyses on data from the High Courts Judicial Database (Haynie et. al. 2007), and the Spaeth U.S. Supreme Court Database; along with data from secondary qualitative sources. Our analysis shows that increasing support structures do not account for the full picture, while other covariates -institutional changes and the court's ideological proclivity to take cases involving individual rights - can play a significant and decisive role in certain settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests Schubert's and Segal and Spaeth's contention that attitudes completely explain the votes of the Supreme Court justices in the United states of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of judge gender are examined in the decisions of judges in the appellate courts of Australia, Canada and the United States. Overall, there were few significant differences in the voting choices of male and female judges in either the top court or the intermediate appellate courts of the three nations examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more important decisions that a federal judge can make is the decision to retire from his or her appointed court. Given the political opportunities created by judicial retirements, prior studies suggest that judges may strategically time their retirements to allow a like-minded president to select their replacements. In this research note, we examine the careers of virtually all federal district court judges appointed from 1946 to 1995 and test an alternative conception of strategic retirements. We suggest that judges may be more concerned with their own prospects of being elevated to an appeals court seat than with their possible replacements. Our analysis supports this hypothesis, as we find that judges are significantly less likely to retire as their chances for elevation increases. In contrast, factors related to policy-oriented behavior do not appear to have an effect on the decision to retire. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking It to the Next Level: the Elevation of District Judges to the US Courts of Appeals Much of the study of public law is dedicated to the investigation of judicial selection to the federal courts. In the US, as in many common law countries, a large number of appellate court vacancies are filled by elevating a judge from the court below. Therefore, an interesting question arises: how can we predict the likelihood that any given judge will be elevated when such a vacancy occurs? In other words, are there systematic patterns associated in elevating federal judges to a higher court? Our paper explores this compelling and important question. In his extensive evaluation of nominations and appointments to the lower federal courts, Goldman (1997) shows us that presidents are most often committed to agendas steered by policy, partisan, and/or personal interests. Most interesting is Goldman’s articulation of policy-influenced goals in nominating and appointing persons to the federal courts. Moreover, partisan and personal interests are also apparent in judicial selection events, as presidents blatantly choose close friends and political party allies for judicial posts in the hopes of paying off debts or bolstering support for his party. Elevation of sitting judges may be an attractive alternative to presidents seeking to further their policy agenda as the prior judicial record of a nominee may provide useful cues of their legal policy orientation. Recent work by Kaheny and Songer provides tentative support for this hypothesis. Their analysis provides preliminary evidence that when presidents choose to elevate judges associated with their own party they select judges whose district court records are consistent with the president’s preferences. Also, they find evidence that when choosing to elevate a judge from the opposite party, these judges are deviant from their party’s policy goals (ex. Democratic presidents elevate the more liberal Republicans). Goldman’s theory of judicial selection and the findings of Kaheny and Songer pave the way for this study of judicial elevation by invoking all three agendas, policy, partisan and personal, into the politics of elevation. In this paper, we examine judicial selection in elevating judges from district courts to the courts of appeals. We will examine patterns in selection strategies shaped by policy, partisan, and personal concerns. Does a judge’s opinion writing record influence his chances of elevation, especially in civil rights and criminal cases? Does the possibility of elevation decrease once a new president takes office? Do party considerations carry over into elevation events? Does the ABA’s evaluation of a judge help or hurt a judge’s chance for elevation? Are former US Attorneys more likely to be the judges chosen for elevation? Do race and gender increase a judge’s likelihood for elevation? Finally, how much of an effect do the policy preferences of home state senators have in the elevation choice? We will attempt to answer these questions by examining all elevations of district court judges since 1960. Construction of two logit models, accounting for elevation by same party presidents in the first model and elevation by opposite party presidents in the second model, will assist in providing answers to the above questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]