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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Brett Curry  and
Banks Miller
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , Winter 2015 , pp. 29 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015 

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References

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