Some Thoughts on the Study of Judicial Behavior

Back in the 1940s the political scientist C. Herman Pritchett began tallying the votes and opinions of Supreme Court Justices. His goal was to use data to test the hypothesis that the Justices were not only following the “law,” but were also motivated by their own ideological preferences. With the hindsight of nearly eighty years, we know that Pritchett’s seemingly small project helped to create a big field: Judicial Behavior, which I take to be the theoretical and empirical study of the choices judges make. Political scientists continue to play a central role, but they are now joined by economists, psychologists, historians, and legal academics. I briefly explore their contributions. I also consider other developments since Pritchett’s time, including the analysis of judicial behavior abroad, the massive improvements in our data, and the increasing number of topics under study. I conclude with some directions the field might take in the next few years. All in all, I am quite optimistic that the study of judicial behavior will continue to hold an important place in the social sciences, history, and, increasingly, I hope, law

The Best for Last: The Timing of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

This Article investigates the hypothesis that the most important and, often, controversial and divisive cases—so called big cases—are disproportionately decided at the end of June. We define a big case in one of four ways: front-page coverage in the New York Times; front-page and other coverage in four national newspapers (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune); the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in a case; and the number of subsequent citations by the Supreme Court to its decision in a case. We find a statistically significant association between each measure of a big case and end-of-term decisions even after controlling for the month of oral argument (cases argued later in the term are more likely to be decided near the end of the term) and case attributes (e.g., dissents and concurrences) that increase the time it takes to decide a case. We also speculate on why big cases cluster at the end of the term. One possibility is legacy and reputational concerns: when writing what they think will be a major decision, the Justices and their law clerks take more time polishing until the last minute with the hope of promoting their reputations. Another is that the end-of-term clustering of the most important cases may tend to diffuse media coverage of and other commentary regarding any particular case, and thus spare the Justices unwanted criticism just before they leave Washington for their summer recess

The Rules of Inference

Although the term “empirical research” has become commonplace in legal scholarship over the past two decades, law professors have, in fact, been conducting research that is empirical—i.e., learning about the world using quantitative data or qualitative information—for almost as long as they have been conducting research. For just as long, however, they appear to have been proceeding with little awareness of, much less compliance with, many of the rules of inference, and without paying heed to the key lessons of the revolution in empirical analysis that has been taking place over the last century in other disciplines. The tradition of including some articles devoted exclusively to the methodology of empirical analysis, so well represented in journals in traditional academic fields, is virtually nonexistent in the nation’s law reviews. As a result, readers learn considerably less accurate information about the empirical world than the studies’ stridently stated, but often overly confident, conclusions suggest. To remedy this situation—both for the producers and consumers of empirical work—we adapt the rules of inference used in the natural and social sciences to the special needs, theories, and data in legal scholarship, and explicate them with extensive illustrations from existing research. We also offer suggestions for how the infrastructure of teaching and research at law schools might be reorganized so that it can better support the creation of first-rate empirical research without compromising other important objectives.Governmen

A variation of McShane's identity for 2-bridge links

We give a variation of McShane's identity, which describes the cusp shape of a hyperbolic 2-bridge link in terms of the complex translation lengths of simple loops on the bridge sphere. We also explicitly determine the set of end invariants of $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$-characters of the once-punctured torus corresponding to the holonomy representations of the complete hyperbolic structures of 2-bridge link complements.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figure

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