Contextual Influences on Court Outcomes

Federal court outcomes in asylum-related appeals 1980?1987: A highly ?politicized? process

“…Wenner (1982) found that geographic location influenced both congressmen and federal court judges in their consideration of environmental issues. In subsequent analysis, Wenner (Wenner and Dutter 1988) supported her earlier observation with her finding that federal court judges in Southern circuits, during the period of 1970-1985, tended to decide environmental cases in favor of industry and against environmental groups; so also did judges from the 10th circuit, located in the West. In district court cases, judges in Northeastern circuits (circuits 1, 2, and 3) had the highest level of support for environmental groups, followed, in descending order, by judges in the Midwest (circuits 6, 7, and 8) and in the South (circuits 4, 5, and 11).…”

“…For the sake of consistency with prior research on the relationship between geographic region of judges and court outcomes (Wenner and Dutter 1988), judges involved in the 146 asylum-related appeals have been grouped, by circuit, into the following geographic regions: North, consisting of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd circuits; South, consisting of the 4th, 5th, and 6th circuits; Midwest, consisting of the 6th, 7th, and 8th circuits; and West, consisting of the 9th and 10th circuits. Although critics might charge that these judicial circuits do not correspond with natural social or economic regions (for example, Midwest circuits include both Arkansas and Tennessee), Wenner (1988, 98) suggests that the federal judicial circuits '... do reflect a grouping of states into regions that were designed to be contiguous and compact for the purposes of communication... Each circuit forms a small legal culture of its own.…”

“…The D.C. circuit is excluded from the analysis of the relationship of geographic region to court outcomes, since judges in the D.C. circuit are appointed from around the United States and, hence, one does not expect regional influences on judicial decisonmaking to be consistent in the D.C. circuit (Wenner and Dutter 1988).…”

“…Probit allows one to examine the relationship between multiple independent variables and a dependent variable when controlling for the effects of the other variables. Probit analysis has been employed in similar research contexts (Wenner and Dutter 1988;Segal 1984;Wall 1985). Table 1 contains the results of probit analysis, deleting the insignificant independent variables (unemployment rate, South, North, Midwest).…”

“…The analyses also fail to explain sufficiently why judicial decisionmaking is 'politicized"; to take into account more than one 'political' variable which may have influenced judicial decisionmaking; and to consider (and to control for) the effects of other, nonpolitical variables which have been shown to have an important impact upon policy making by the judiciary and by decisionmakers within the overtly political branches (executive and legislative). Such variables include, for example, the region of the country of the decisionmaker (Wenner 1982;Wenner and Dutter 1988;Carp and Rowland 1983;Richardson and Vines 1978) and economic conditions at the time of (or shortly prior to) deeisionmaking. Finally, many analyses fail to consider that certain political or contextual variables may be significant only in limited policy areas, and not in others.…”