Judicial Specialization and Ideological Decision Making in the US Courts of Appeals

Abstract

We investigate the influence of subject matter expertise, opinion specialization, and judicial experience on the role of ideology in decision making in the courts of appeals in a generalized, as opposed to specialized, setting. We find that subject matter experts and opinion specialists are significantly more likely to engage in ideological decision making than their nonspecialist counterparts and that opinion specialization is a particularly potent factor in ideological decision making. Further, increased judicial experience has no effect on the conditional use of ideology. We discuss the potentially wide-ranging implications of our findings for both theory and policy.

Small‐Group Dynamics, Ideology, and Decision Making on the US Courts of Appeals

“…With regard to opinion specialization in particular, it has been suggested that, analogous to scholarship on congressional committee outliers (see Maltzman 1997;Gilligan and Krehbiel 1995;Londregan and Snyder 1995;Maltzman and Smith 1995), nonspecialists allow opinion specialists to speak for the panel due to their greater facility in a particular area of law. In order to compensate these specialists for investing their time and energy in that legal area, nonspecialists on the panel may acquiesce to more ideological opinions than they otherwise would (Curry and Miller 2015). Indeed, ceding a measure of influence to specialists in this way would carry with it particular institutional advantages.…”

“…2 We must establish empirically the behavior we expect to observe from specialists because extant evidence on this score has been quite limited; without doing so, we cannot say a priori that specialists are, in fact, more ideological than their counterparts. The nascent literature on this topic does provide an indication that specialists should be more ideological, meaning that liberal or conservative specialists should be more liberal or conservative, respectively, within their areas of specialization than their nonspecialist counterparts (Curry and Miller 2015;Miller and Curry 2009). Establishing the effects of opinion specialization on specialists themselves is a necessary first step to determining whether-and how-specialists may influence the decisions of fellow panelists.…”

“…Our dependent variable is whether the judge voted in a liberal direction, where our characterization of a liberal decision is taken from traditional (i.e., Spaeth et al 2013) thinking about liberal and conservative outcomes. In antitrust cases, we characterize liberal decisions as those in which a judge votes to break a monopoly; for defenses of this characterization, see Curry and Miller (2015) and Landes and Posner (2003). In environmental cases we counted liberal decisions as those that favored more environmental regulation (e.g., Revesz 1990), and in cases where criminal environmental liability was alleged, we counted as liberal those cases in which the court upheld a conviction against those accused of environmental crimes.…”

“…We also include an indicator of whether the lawsuit is a class action or not. For reasons we explore in Curry and Miller (2015), we expect both of these variables to positively influence the likelihood of a liberal decision.…”

“…Specifically, we isolate one potentially salient individual characteristic-subject matter specialization-and seek to determine the effects of this characteristic on decision making in the US courts of appeals. Evidence from specialized courts (Miller and Curry 2009) and, in one particular issue area, from the courts of appeals more generally (Curry and Miller 2015) suggests that judges who are specialists will be more ideological than those who are not. Therefore, as a preliminary matter, we seek to confirm this finding across multiple issue areas in courts of general jurisdiction.…”