Diverse Federal trial judges are more likely to rule in favor of minorities and women in sex and racial discrimination cases

Since 2009, 62 percent of President Obama’s Federal trial court judge selections have been racial and ethnic minorities and/or females; he now holds the record for having the highest percentage of female and racial minority trial judges appointed by a US president. But do these new judges work to represent female and racial minority causes? In new research which studies employment discrimination cases filed in the federal courts, Christina L. Boyd finds that female judges are about 15 percent more likely to find in favor of the plaintiff than male judges, and that black judges are 39 percent more likely than white judges to rule in favor of the plaintiff in race discrimination decisions

Disputing Limited Liability

This project presents six years of hand-collected federal district court data to analyze the first representative sample of veil piercing litigation. Our method identifies veil piercing complaints through Westlaw\u27s trial pleadings database and codes each case through a detailed examination of PACER records. We test a variety of hypotheses to understand how such litigations are resolved. We find that plaintiffs succeed quite often in veil piercing litigation, if success is defined as winning on motions that do not terminate a case. A variety of legal and extra-legal factors predict such interstitial veil piercing successes. Voluntary creditor causes of action promote veil piercing; LLCs are in very limited circumstances better insulated from veil piercing claims than corporations; undercapitalization is strongly associated with success while conclusory grounds like façade and sham are not; and defendants\u27 legal sophistication is predictive of plaintiff failure. Extra-legal factors play a more striking and counterintuitive role. Plaintiffs suing companies with few employees are much more likely to win veil piercing motions, and obtain relief in cases, than plaintiffs suing companies employing many workers. This results holds even when controlling for legally-relevant variables. Contrary to both theory and previous empirical work, we also find that judicial liberalism is inversely related to the likelihood of plaintiff success. Our results call into question existing normative and descriptive approaches to the disputation of limited liability and contribute to more general scholarship about selection effects and judicial behavior. They do not provide any easy answers to the question of what defendants can do to insulate themselves from veil piercing. Our analysis suggests: Very little, apart from being very big

Litigating Toward Settlement

Civil litigation typically ends when the parties compromise. While existing theories of settlement primarily focus on information exchange, we instead examine how motion practice, especially non-discovery motions, can substantially shape parties’ knowledge about their cases and thereby influence the timing of settlement. Using docket-level federal district court data, we find a number of strong effects regarding how motions can influence this process, including that the filing of a motion significantly speeds case settlement, that granted motions are more immediately critical to settlement timing than motions denied, and that plaintiff victories have a stronger effect than defendant victories. These results provide a uniquely detailed look at the mechanism of compromise via information exchange and motion practice in litigation while simultaneously yielding evidence that this effect goes well beyond the traditionally studied discovery process

The Effects of Trial Judge Gender and Public Opinion on Criminal Sentencing Decisions

We explore the effects of a trial judge\u27s gender in criminal sentencing decisions by addressing two unsettled questions. First, do female and male trial judges sentence criminal offenders differently from one another? While numerous qualitative and quantitative scholars have examined this question, the results lack consistency. Second, are female trial judges\u27 sentencing practices differentially affected by public opinion compared to male judges\u27 behavior? Little research exists on this second question, but existing theory on how females and males make decisions and operate as judges is informative. To provide new empirical insight into these questions, we rely on two sources of data: judge sentences stemming from Colorado trial court marijuana-related drug cases filed from 2004 to 2009 and local public opinion on marijuana from a 2006 Colorado general election initiative on whether to legalize marijuana possession. These data permit us to analyze judges\u27 baseline sentencing practices (pre-2006 initiative) and the effect that public opinion has on the sentences (pre- vs. post-2006 initiative). The statistical modeling indicates that while male and female judges in Colorado generally do not sentence defendants differently from one another, there is one exception. Namely, female judges are more lenient than male judges when sentencing female defendants. Our empirical results also indicate that while Colorado trial judges were responsive to local public opinion following the 2006 marijuana initiative, that responsiveness was not more potent for female judges than it was for male judges. Together, these empirical results provide important new insights into the behavior of male and female trial court judges

An Examination of Strategic Anticipation of Appellate Court Preferences by Federal District Court Judges

This Essay tackles the complicated relationships within the federal judicial hierarchy with a focus on the relatively understudied connection between the Supreme Court and district courts

Administrative Law\u27s Political Dynamics

Over thirty years ago, the Supreme Court in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. commanded courts to uphold federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as long as those interpretations are reasonable. This Chevron deference doctrine was based in part on the Court\u27s desire to temper administrative law\u27s political dynamics by vesting federal agencies, not courts, with primary authority to make policy judgments about ambiguous laws Congresscharged the agencies to administer. Despite this express objective, scholars such as Frank Cross, Emerson Tiller, and Cass Sunstein have empirically documented how politics influence circuit court review of agency statutory interpretations in a post-Chevron world. Among other .things, they have reported whistleblower and panel effects, in that ideologically diverse panels are less likely to be influenced by their partisan priors than ideologically uniform panels. Leveraging the most comprehensive dataset to date on Chevron deference in the circuit courts (more than 1,600 cases over eleven years), this Article explores administrative law\u27s political dynamics. Contrary to prior, more limited studies, we find that legal doctrine (i.e., Chevron deference) has a powerful constraining effect on partisanship in judicial decisionmaking. To be sure, we still find some statistically significant results as to partisan influence. But the overall picture provides compelling evidence that the Chevron Court\u27s objective to reduce partisan judicial decisionmaking has been quite effective. Also contrary to prior studies, we find no statistically significant whistleblower or panel effects. These findings have important implications for the current debate over the future of Chevron deference. Our findings identify a significant, overlooked cost of eliminating or narrowing Chevron deference: such reform could result in partisanship playing a larger role in judicial review of agency statutory interpretation

The Politics of Selecting Chevron Deference

In this article, we examine an important threshold question in judicial behavior and administrative law: When do federal circuit courts decide to use the Chevron deference framework and when do they select a framework that is less deferential to the administrative agency\u27s statutory interpretation? The question is important because the purpose of Chevron deference is to give agencies-not judges-policy-making space within statutory interpretation. We expect, nonetheless, that whether to invoke the Chevron framework is largely driven by political dynamics, with judges adopting a less deferential standard when their political preferences do not align with the agency\u27s decision. To provide insight, we analyze circuit court decisions from 2003 until 2013 that review agency statutory interpretations. Our results-from the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind-- provide partial confirmation of our expectations. When courts reviewed liberal agency interpretations, all panels-liberal, moderate, and conservative-were equally likely to apply Chevron. However, when reviewing conservative agency interpretations, liberal panels selected the Chevron deference framework significantly less frequently than conservative panels. Contrary to limited prior studies, we find no evidence of whistleblower or disciplining effects when judges of different judicial ideologies comprised the panel. Viewed together, our results provide important implications for the current debate on whether to eliminate, narrow, or clarify Chevron\u27s domain

Judge Kavanaugh, Chevron Deference, and the Supreme Court

How might a new U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh review federal agency statutory interpretations that come before him on the Court? To find at least a preliminary answer, we can look to his judicial behavior while serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit—and there is plenty of relevant Kavanaugh judicial behavior to observe. Since starting his service on the D.C. Circuit in 2006, Judge Kavanaugh has participated in the disposition of around 2,700 cases and has authored more than 300 opinions. Over a third of those authored opinions involved administrative law

Senators treat female Supreme Court nominees differently. Here’s the evidence.

Over the weekend, President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court seat left empty by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to move the nomination swiftly through to confirmation. As a result, the nation’s attention will soon turn to Barrett’s confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Based on our empirical examinations of every question asked and every answer given at the hearings since the first in 1939, here is what to expect