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The article presents an examination of the U.S. Court of Appeals' databases and the federal appellate court dockets as of July 2012, focusing on the discovery of trends in the appellate court system regarding judicial behavior and litigation participation. Professor Donald R. Songer's development of the Songer Database which contains numerous published decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals, along with professor Harold Spaeth's contributions to a similar database of U.S. Supreme Court decisions,are also addressed.

The article focuses on the ruling of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on the case "Murphy v. Boston Herald Inc." Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy filed a complaint against the Boston Herald, reporter David Wedge, and three other individuals for damaging his reputation because of false stories. It is noted that Boston Herald and its reporter Wedge made an allegation that Murphy made a callous remark about a teenage rape victim. The jury returned the verdict in favor of Murphy and awarded him with $2 million in compensatory damages.

The article offers a look and challenges on the trial judge nominating process in New York for its trial courts. In Lopez Torres v. New York State Board of Elections, the Second Circuit ruled that the state's nominating process for these courts deprives potential judicial candidates and voters of their First Amendment rights. Implications of the ruling is presented.

In a line of cases commencing with Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000), the Supreme Court has held the Constitution commands that juries must decide factual issues that lead to sentencing determinations by judges. When the Apprendi logic was extended to Blakely v. Washington (2004) regarding state sentencing guidelines, the mandatory sentencing scheme in the federal Sentencing Guidelines seemed threatened. Indeed, the Supreme Court continued this line of thinking in United States v. Booker (2005), when it held the mandatory nature of the federal Sentencing Guidelines unconstitutional. I analyze the influence of these Supreme Court decisions by showing how the courts of appeals handled these new directives in sentencing, particularly during the short time between Blakely and Booker when the state of the law in federal courts was in flux. My purpose is to decipher how the federal courts handled this area of the law while it remained open and subject to dissimilar interpretations. Accordingly, I traverse the federal courts' rationale for sentencing from Apprendi to Booker, concentrating in detail on the short time frame between Blakely and Booker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have been intrigued by the abrupt change in the rate of nonconsensual opinions that the Supreme Court has published over time, which substantially increased beginning with the battles concerning the court's New Deal transition in the 1930s. Notwithstanding, none of the prior studies on this topic has made any link, whether theoretical or empirical, between the Supreme Court's issuance of these special opinions and the justices’ policy preferences. We utilize fractional cointegration to examine the relationship between consensus, agendas, and decisionmaking on the Supreme Court. We find that there is a systematic interrelation between the justices’ policy preferences and their issuance of nonconsensual opinions that is dependent upon the policy agenda before the court. In turn, this connection influences the court's policy outcomes, demonstrating that the justices’ behavior regarding nonconsensual opinion writing is a classic example of judicial policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do newly appointed justices experience acclimation effects upon their ascent to the Supreme Court? We contend that acclimation is a process, as justices' conformation to the doctrine of stare decisis is partly a function of tenure length. We find that precedent conformance is inversely related to tenure, with newcomers following legal precedents at rates significantly greater than more tenured colleagues; however, justices slowly but surely surrender to relatively unfettered judicial power at the Supreme Court, as attitudes increasingly dominate decisionmaking. While votes adhering to precedent are more prevalent for newcomers, all justices are overwhelmingly influenced by their own ideologies, confirming the inability of the legal model to influence or explain this aspect of judicial behavior. Our results also indicate that the proclivity of prior research to specify an express period of acclimation may be flawed. Instead, acclimation is a dynamic process, ever evolving over justices' entire duration of service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]