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Objective: Attention to levels of socioeconomic inequality has given rise to work investigating its potential to influence political actors and, thus, policy outcomes. These studies have focused on elected actors in legislative contexts. Ours fills this gap by assessing the consequences of a judge's wealth on decision making. Methods: We obtain data on federal appellate judges' wealth and explore its influence in cases involving economic issues. We estimate logit models controlling for other factors and include fixed effects for circuit, specific issue area, and year of the decision. The models consider both the main effects of wealth and its potential interaction with judicial ideology to influence decision making. Results: We find no direct relationship between a judge's wealth and her decision making in economic cases. However, wealth interacts with ideology to exert a significant influence on decision making; here, greater wealth amplifies the ideological predilections of more conservative judges. Conclusions: This is the first study to document a link between wealth and the choices judges make on the bench. It adds a new dimension to the ways economic inequality can influence political actors and raises new questions about the mechanisms by which such inequality is consequential for elite political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the variation in the interpretation and enforcement of international law by domestic judges? Can independent judiciaries control the enforcement of countries' commitments to international law? In this paper, we leverage a unique source of data—cases related to the Alien Tort Statute—to investigate how independent judges might be able to enforce international commitments to human rights without concern for whether the state (here the United States) has opted into the commitments in the first place. We show that behavioral factors in judicial decision making, and particularly those related to judicial ideological preferences, are potent predictors of judicial enforcement of international law. This implies that states with highly independent judiciaries are right to be worried about their abilities to control enforcement domestically, although we also find evidence that the U.S. government get a special degree of deference in these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies concerning undocumented immigrants are inevitably ambivalent, creating uncertainty and confusion in the implementation process. We identify a clear example of this ambivalence —U.S. law setting standards for determining the credibility of asylum seekers—that resulted in an increase in asylum grants despite policymakers' intention to make it harder for individuals to obtain the status. We argue that this law, The REAL ID Act of 2005, sent mixed messages to immigration judges (IJs), street‐level bureaucrats who implement immigration policy. It increased IJ discretion, but set vague limits. We theorize that IJs, behaving in a bounded rationality framework, use their professional legal training as a short‐cut and look primarily to the courts for guidance. Our evidence supports our argument. After the passage of the REAL ID Act, IJ decision‐making is more closely aligned with the preferences of their political and legal principals, and, in the final score, the federal circuit courts are the winners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the center of contentious debates concerning U.S. asylum policy are immigration judges, bureaucrats who decide life and death cases on a daily basis. Congress, the executive and the courts compete for influence over these key actors — administrative judges distinct from those examined in much of the bureaucratic control literature. They are hired, fired, promoted or demoted by executive officials; face congressional oversight; and must follow circuit law. We argue that, because of the fear of reversal, immigration judges will look most to the courts in the decision-making process. Our results support our theory. Examining over 900,000 immigration judges' decisions, we find that, although IJs are influenced by a fear of pushback from the elected branches, the impact is conditional on circuit preferences. Our findings inform scholarly understanding of judicial behavior and bureaucratic accountability, and support the pursuit of judicial independence and due process in immigration courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References to foreign legal judgments in several recent Supreme Court decisions have given rise to substantial legal and political controversy. While those debates have largely focused on normative matters, we [...]

The inner workings of advisory commissions are opaque, which has frustrated inquiries about them. However, relying on data obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request from the Department of Justice, we focus on one readily observable aspect of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys (AGAC)—its composition. Unique to studies of executive commissions, we know the population from which AGAC membership is drawn. This allows us to definitively characterize the ideological distribution of the population of potential appointees, a significant advance in the empirical study of executive appointments. While the analysis cannot speak to AGAC's operations directly, our findings indicate that AGAC is characterized by asymmetrical political polarization. Democratic administrations are likely to politicize AGACs ideologically but Republicans are not, and we consider possible explanations for this result. In addition to its contribution toward understanding one aspect of informational commissions as an important source of policy development, the study provides the first empirical analysis of one route by which administrations interface with the nation's prosecutorial corps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is some evidence that judges who specialize in particular legal areas vote in more ideologically consistent ways than do nonspecialists. Upon replicating those individual results across multiple legal areas in the US courts of appeals, we assess how this increasing reliance on ideology by specialists affects decision making by others on a three-judge panel. We find that judges who serve with a specialist are especially likely to vote in a manner consistent with the ideological position of the specialist with whom they serve. These results suggest that specialization has the potential to facilitate panel effects across numerous legal policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]