Using nominations to Article III district and appeals court judgeships, we test a model of senatorial treatment of presidential nominations to the lower federal bench, looking both at outcome (whether or not a nomination culminates in confirmation) and process (the length of time it takes the Senate to process a nomination). We find evidence that nominee quality matters, as does composition of the Judiciary Committee and pending judicial nominations. Contrary to charges made in the popular press, however, neither race nor gender makes a difference for ultimate success or failure of a nomination. Duration analysis reveals that race (though not gender) does matter for district court nomination processing time. We also find presidential year and term to matter for both levels of court but the outcome of the Bork nomination to affect only appeals court nominations.

Students of judicial behavior have increasingly turned to strategic accounts to understand judicial decision making. Scholarship on the Supreme Court and state high courts suggests that the decision to dissent is better understood in light of strategic considerations rather than simply reflecting ideological disagreement. We investigate whether these findings comport with behavior by judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We develop a spatial model of the decision to dissent that incorporates both attitudinal and strategic elements and subject this model to empirical analysis. We find that ideological disagreement between a judge and the majority opinion writer is a more persuasive explanation of the decision to dissent than a strategic account in which a judge conditions a dissent on whether circuit intervention would obtain the judge's preferred outcome. Though we do not discount the existence of other types of strategic behavior on the Courts of Appeals, our research suggests that strategic accounts of dissenting behavior are not generalizable to all courts.

No abstract

In this article, we set ourselves to the task of identifying the determinants of separate opinion writing on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Utilizing a new institutional theoretical framework, we evaluate a series of hypotheses concerning the connection between separate opinion writing behavior and attitudinal, institutional, and legal factors. Within this broad theoretical framework, we are particularly sensitive to the manner in which judges may advance certain goals through authorship of separate opinions. We find that judges' policy preferences, case salience, and collegiality norms all affect the likelihood that a judge will write a separate opinion. Our research provides additional support for integrated models of judicial decision-making that take into account institutional, attitudinal, and legal influences on judicial behavior.

Objective. This article investigates the existence of a freshman effect on separate opinion authorship on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. First, we evaluate the extent to which freshman judges demonstrate unique behavior with respect to writing concurring and dissenting opinions. Second, we examine the potential for background factors to condition any freshman effect. Methods. Individual judges' decisions to author separate opinions, drawn from the Courts of Appeals Database (1960 to 1988), are modeled as a function of a host of individual‐ and circuit‐level factors, including the freshman status of the judge. Results. After controlling for alternative explanations, we find that freshman judges on the courts of appeals are less likely to author concurring and dissenting opinions. Prior federal or appellate court experience, however, does not appear to condition the freshman effect. Conclusion. Freshman circuit court judges experience significant acclimation effects following their elevation to the federal appellate bench.