Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Abstract

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be insulated from political pressure and, as a result, indifferent to the concerns of the electorate. We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by senior English judges between 1985 and 2005. Throughout this period the popular view was one of ill-disciplined elitism: senior judges were alleged to be favouring candidates from elite backgrounds over their equally capable nonelite counterparts. We find evidence in support of this view to be surprisingly weak; most of the unconditional difference in promotion prospects between the two groups can simply be explained by differences in promotion-relevant characteristics. We then exploit an unexpected proposal to remove control over promotions from the judiciary and find that judges' behaviour dramatically changed. When faced by the prospect of losing autonomy, senior judges began to favour non-elite candidates, as well as candidates who were unconnected to members of the promotion committee. * We thank Oriana Bandiera, Pablo Casas-Arce, Daniel Ferreira, Paul Klemperer, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Howard Smith, Kathy Spier, John Vickers, various seminar audiences and, in particular, the Editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Baroness Hale, Kate Malleson, Lord Justice Maurice Kay, the Commission for Judicial Appointments, Her Majesty's Courts Service and the Ministry of Justice for many useful conversations. All errors are our own.

Lobbying and dismissal dispute resolution systems

“…Hence, we take a wider view of lobbying the judiciary. This interpretation relies on findings that the judiciary is prone to (political) influence and open to rent-seeking (Rubin and Shepherd, 2013), such that court behavior can be traced to the political motivation of judges (George and Epstein, 1992;Posner, 1993;Ashenfelter et al, 1995;Segal and Spaeth, 1996;Stephenson, 2009;Blanes i Vidal and Leaver, 2011;Rubin, 2005).…”

Bias in Open Peer-Review: Evidence from the English Superior Courts

“…for i = 1, ..., 2262. The model in (5) imposes two additional assumptions, namely that the effect of treatment is linear and (more restrictively) is constant across i. Under these assumptions, β = Order and so the OLS estimate β provides a robustness check for (4).…”

“…This setting enables us to test for two of the sources of bias noted above, backward and fowardlooking favouritism. 5 The sociology literature suggests that interaction occurring in a situation of cooperative interdependence, such as working together on an appeal, is likely to promote friendship (Moody 2001). If backward-looking favouritism exists, we should therefore see a higher affirmance rate when a panel member has worked with the reviewed judge than when all panel members lack on-thejob interaction.…”

“…4 Both Salzberger and Fenn (1999) and Blanes i Vidal and Leaver (2011) document that reversals are negatively associated with promotion prospects in the English superior courts. 5 Data limitations prevent us from testing for discrimination.…”

Social Interactions and the Content of Legal Opinions

“…Once a case has been allocated to the CA Civ and the size of the panel has been determined, the task of forming the panel falls to the CA Civ Listing Officer who is an employee of the court rather than a judge. 6 Our conversations with a listing officer for the CA Civ suggest that the principles underlying panel formation run as follows. First, only "ticketed" judges can be chosen.…”