Decision Making in the Federal Judicial Hierarchy

联邦司法系统的一个特点是它的等级结构；这种结构塑造了其中法官的目标，并引发了对监督(对下级法院)和合规(对上级法院)的担忧。这些因素反过来又与案件和法官层面对决策的影响相互作用。因此，联邦系统中司法决策的完整特征必须考虑到特定案件、特定法官和等级效应的影响，后者同时考虑“向上看”(监督)和“向下看”(合规)行为；理想情况下，这种模式还必须在等级的三个级别上一致地衡量这些因素，并允许这些影响的大小在不同的法院之间有所不同。我们开发了这样一个模型，并通过分析所有参与的联邦法官在1953-2005年间由联邦最高法院裁决的所有案件的每个下级法院诉讼程序中的行动来分析其影响。通过在每个案件中对司法等级的不同级别的数据进行编码，我们的方法使我们能够在给定的案件背景下审查司法投票，从而保持可能影响司法判决的案件具体因素的范围不变。此外，通用等级和混合模型的最新进展允许灵活地指定法官和法院特定影响的相互作用，包括那些与由于法官对监督、合规或两者的潜在担忧而产生的等级效应有关的影响。最后，我们数据收集的最终结果将是对过去50年来美国最高法院做出的每一起案件中每一名联邦法官所做的每一项决定的全面记录；因此，这些数据将为学者研究美国联邦法院的法官裁决提供无与伦比的资源。

AbstractA signature characteristic of the federal judicial system is its hierarchical structure; that structure shapes the goals of the judges within it, and induces concerns about oversight (for lower courts) and compliance (for higher courts). Such factors, in turn, interact with both case- and judge-level influences on decision making. A complete characterization of judicial decision making in the federal system must therefore allow for the influence of case-specific, judge-specific, and hierarchical effects, with the latter considering both "upward-looking" (oversight) and "downward-looking" (compliance) behavior; ideally, such a model must also measure those factors consistently across the three levels of the hierarchy, and allow for the magnitude of those effects to vary across divergent courts. We develop such a model, and analyze its implications through an analysis of the actions of all participating federal judges in each of the lower court proceedings for all cases decided in the U.S. Supreme Court which originated in a federal district court from 1953-2005. By coding data at the various levels of the judicial hierarchy in each case, our approach allows us to examine judicial voting within a given case context, and thereby holds constant the range of case-specific factors that might otherwise influence judicial decisions. In addition, recent advances in generalized hierarchical and mixed models allow for a flexible specification of the interaction of judge- and court-specific influences, including those related to hierarchy effects due to judges' potential concerns with oversight, compliance, or both. Finally, the end result of our data collection will be a comprehensive accounting of every decision made by every federal judge in every case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court over the past five decades; those data will thus offer scholars an unparalleled resource for the study of judges' decisions in the U.S. federal courts.