A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession

Abstract

We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the U.S. Supreme Court. These data open up significant areas of scholarly inquiry.

The Political Ideologies of Law Clerks and their Judges

“…(70 judges) to be at least somewhat liberal (negative CFscore); of the 474 Democratic appointed judges, we measure 11.4% (54 judges) to be at least somewhat conservative (positive CFscore). As Figures 6 and 7 make clear, however, judges tend to be more conservative than law clerks, with a large density of judges concentrated at the more conservative end of the spectrum (with a CFscore greater than 0.5), a pattern consistent with the work of Bonica and Sen (2016). This might suggest a lack of correspondence between clerks (who tend to be relatively liberal) and judges (who tend to be more conservative).…”

“…As discussed by Bonica (2014), the scores yield measures comparable to widely used ideological scores for political actors. For example, CFscores have been shown to correlate strongly with existing ideological estimates for Congressional representatives to recover the rankorderings of Supreme Court Justices yielded by existing measures, and outperform ideological scalings for lower court federal judges (Bonica and Sen, 2016). As applied to judicial clerks, an important advantage of the CFscore is that other measures of ideology are generally unavailable, with the (rare) exception of those clerks who go on to hold political office themselves.…”

“…1 First, we leverage the fact that federal judges generally hire new law clerks each year to estimate judicial ideology dynamically. Thus, unlike most existing measures of lower-court judge ideology, which estimate ideology statically at the time of appointment (Giles et al, 2001;Bonica and Sen, 2016), our measure captures within-judge changes in ideology over time. A second advantage of our approach is that it is available for the entirety of the federal bench.…”

“…A second advantage of our approach is that it is available for the entirety of the federal bench. That is, although not all judges make political contributions themselves (which prevents the construction of ideology for many judges, as in Bonica and Sen, 2016) or hear cases on overlapping panels (as is required for item response theory models that are used to estimate ideology based on similarities in voting patterns, as in Martin and Quinn, 2002), the vast majority of federal judges hire multiple law clerks each year who often make contributions. To our knowledge, our approach is among the first to allow time-varying estimates of the ideology of all judges outside the Supreme Court-a possibility that opens up a variety of questions for future research to explore.…”

“…We match 93 percent of judges to DIME. We refer readers toBonica and Sen (2016) for an extended discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of using political contributions to measure judicial ideology.13 See for additional work along these lines.…”