How policy influence varies with race and gender in the US courts of appeals

Even when women and people of color achieve positions of political power, institutional norms may combine with social constructions of difference to create a system in which power is distributed disproportionately. Such a pattern is evident in the US courts of appeals. Each case is resolved by a panel of three judges who also decide whether the opinion should be binding precedent (i.e., published) or not. I theorized that the variety of views and extended deliberation often attributed to diversity in a small-group environment depressed the rate of publication if judges were willing to compromise on the outcome but less willing to publish an opinion after such compromise. Using a massive original dataset of virtually all dispositive circuit opinions from 2002 to 2012, I found that homogeneous panels (98% of which are composed of white men) shaped policy more frequently than diverse panels.

Collegial Courts: Panel Decision-Making and the U.S. Courts of Appeals

The three-judge panel mechanism by which the courts of appeals process almost all (though not quite all) of their cases affords scholars unique opportunities to explore how appellate court decision-making may transcend being merely the sum of its parts. Specifically, court of appeals judges pursue their decision-making responsibilities as part of a collegial group, and thus it is important to understand how being a member of a multimember court influences their behavior.

Mechanisms Underlying Familial Influence on Elite Political Behavior: Evidence from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals

This article contributes to the literature addressing family influences on elite political behavior. By empirically assessing the influence of sibling gender on judicial decision-making, we are able to present evidence on the mechanism by which child, sibling and other relatives’ gender may influence elite political behavior. We build on a published dataset by mining various archival sources to compile data on the gender of judges’ siblings. We find no evidence that male judges’ votes on so-called “women’s issues” (employment discrimination based on gender or pregnancy, reproductive rights/abortion, and Title IX) are affected by whether they have a sister, and we are able to rule out large effects of a sibling’s gender on male and female judges’ votes. Our results imply that the relationship between family member gender and elite political behavior is driven by the desire to avoid costs of discrimination, rather than learning from family members.

Resolving Division Among the U.S. Courts of Appeals: What Constitutes a Physical Restraint?

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Rethinking the Reasonable Response: Safeguarding the Promise of Kingsley for Conditions of Confinement

Nearly five million individuals are admitted to America’s jails each year, and at any given time, two-thirds of those held in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Under current Supreme Court doctrine, these pretrial detainees are functionally protected by the same standard as convicted prisoners, despite the fact that they are formally protected by different constitutional amendments. A 2015 decision, Kingsley v. Hendrickson, declared that a different standard would apply to pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners in the context of use of force: consistent with the Constitution’s mandate that they not be punished at all, pretrial detainees would no longer need to demonstrate that officials subjectively intended to harm them, only that the force they applied was objectively unreasonable. Courts of appeals have begun to extend this shift to claims involving conditions of confinement, but the promise of that move is threatened by the availability of a cost defense for officials who respond reasonably to detainees’ needs given the resource constraints they face. This Note argues that pretrial detainees can only be adequately protected from punishment if the reasonable response includes an affirmative duty to notify superiors of those constraints.

Revisiting Senatorial Courtesy and the Selection of Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals

We examine how elite attitudes and institutional rules and norms affect appointments to lower federal courts. Using voting data from 1,339 U.S. Courts of Appeals cases, we estimate new ideological measures for 475 individual circuit judges appointed between 1913 and 2008. We find that both presidential and home-state senators’ preferences strongly predict judicial ideology. While we find evidence that conditions of senatorial courtesy can constrain presidents from nominating like-minded individuals for lower court vacancies, this trend peaked during the 1960s and has been eroding ever since.