In an earlier study of voting behavior of U.S. appeals courts judges, attitudinal patterns were investigated along with an analysis of the relationship of judges' backgrounds to their decisions. In this revisit, the earlier findings were treated as hypotheses and tested with a new case population covering a subsequent and longer time period. In all, 2,115 cases decided nonunanimously were coded on one or more issues. Most cases could be classified under ten broad issue categories which were then utilized for most of the analyses. Although the research design was similar to that of the earlier study, a wider variety of methods was employed including nonparametric and parametric intercorrelations of voting behavior on the ten issues and stepwise multiple regression and partial correla-tion analyses of seven background variables and their relationships to voting behavior on the issues. The principal findings were similar to those found earlier but it was possible to map voting behavior with some-what more precision and to uncover some unexpected relationships such as those concerning the potency of the age variable particularly for voting on political liberalism issues.

Voting behavior of public decision-makers has been of central concern for political scientists. For example, studies of legislatures (notably of Congress) have investigated such research problems as: (1) the extent to which voting on one issue is related to voting on other issues; (2) the potency of party affiliation as an organizer of attitudes and a predictor of voting behavior; and (3) the relationship of demographic characteristics to voting behavior. These and related concerns have more recently occupied the attention of students of the judiciary whose focus has primarily been on the United States Supreme Court. State courts of last resort have also provided a testing ground primarily for problems (2) and (3). However, the United States courts of appeals, second only to the Supreme Court in judicial importance, have been largely neglected. This paper considers the above research problems with reference to the voting behavior on all eleven courts of appeals from July 1, 1961 through June 30, 1964.

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This article looks at the appointment and confirmation politics of President Obama’s nominees during the 114th Congress in which unprecedented obstruction and delay of Obama's nominees including the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland occurred. This is placed within the overall context of Obama’s impact on the judiciary. The demographic portrait of the Obama judiciary is sketched with special attention to the historic record of diverse nontraditional appointees. We conclude with a look at what lies ahead with the Trump administration and judicial appointments/confirmation.

This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935-1955, and 1960-1975. The business of the three circuits was found to have changed substantially from the 1895-1910 time period to the modern period. In the earlier years the circuits had small proportions of criminal cases—with the exception of the Second Circuit—a significant portion of real property cases, substantial proportions of business cases, and significant proportions of tort cases. By the 1960-1975 period a sizable proportion of the business of all three circuits was devoted to criminal and other public-law type cases; there were negligible proportions of real property cases, relatively small proportions of business cases, and even smaller proportions of tort cases. Public disputes replaced private disputes as the major source of the courts' business, and over time there has been a convergence among the circuits in the mix of cases coming to them.