A Study Into the Effect of Employment Conditions Upon Judicial Behavior and Performance

在普通法司法管辖区，上诉法官通过建立以前的判决，利用以前的法官描述的事实，推理和结果来指导他们的裁决，随着时间的推移构建法律的规则。在这一方案中，高质量的上诉决策通过帮助未来的法官做出正确的决定而产生有益的溢出效应。与所有公职人员一样，上诉法官的业绩将部分取决于他们的就业条件。在美国各地，法官的选拔、薪酬和留用规则因州而异，在最佳前进方向上没有达成共识。本研究旨在探讨不同的司法选择，补偿和保留计划的重要性，通过测量的影响，法官的表现，在规则定义这些schemes.To为此，该项目将建立一个新的数据集的就业规则和性能的国家上诉法官的离散变化。该数据集将包括1947年至1994年期间所有州上诉法院案件的信息。由于州立法而发生的就业条件的变化被用作“自然实验”，以梳理就业规则和各种绩效衡量标准之间的关系。雇用规则包括法官工资、法官任期地位、法官保留程序和任期长短。绩效指标包括意见的数量和长度，意见的语言丰富性，对意见的研究量，以及随后引用意见的数量。对这些变量的更高的测量反映了更大的法官努力写作的意见，并可能对法律的发展产生更大的影响。以前的研究司法性能依赖于更短的时间内，因此不能利用自然变化的就业条件。在这个项目中，研究人员观察法官个人如何改变他们的行为，从而能够跟踪就业规则变化的因果影响。这种分析可以帮助决策者制定就业条件，以便更有效地使用稀缺的公共资金。此外，重新任命的规则依赖于不同的主观绩效衡量标准，因此该项目可以为有效监督高技能员工（如州上诉法官）提供见解。更一般地说，这项研究将扩展最近的工作，在激励计划如何与内在动机相互作用，否则扭曲分配的努力在多个专业任务。对于政治经济学家来说，研究结果将与不同选举制度中的激励机制研究相关，该项目将产生一套关于法官就业条件和法官业绩的原始数据，供感兴趣的研究人员使用。这组数据以及由此产生的论文不仅会引起经济学家的兴趣，还会引起广泛的社会科学家、法律的学者和政策分析师的兴趣。

In common-law jurisdictions, appellate judges construct legal rules over time by building on previous decisions, using the facts, reasoning, and outcomes described by previous judges to guide their rulings. In this scheme, high-quality appellate decision-making has beneficial spillovers by helping future judges make good decisions. As with all public officials, the performance of appellate judges will depend in part on their conditions of employment. Across the United States the rules for selecting, compensating, and retaining judges vary significantly by state, with no consensus on the best way forward. This research seeks to explore the importance of different judicial selection, compensation, and retention schemes by measuring the effects on judge performance of discrete changes in the rules defining these schemes.To that end, the project will build a new data set on the employment rules for and performance of state appellate judges. This data set will include information from all state appellate court cases between 1947 and 1994. Changes in employment conditions that occur as the result of state legislation are used as "natural experiments" to tease out the relationships between employment rules and a variety of performance measures. Employment rules include judge salary, judge tenure status, judge retention processes, and length of term of office. Performance measures include number and length of opinions, the linguistic richness of opinions, the amount of research going into opinions, and the number of subsequent citations to opinions. Higher measurements on these variables reflect greater judge effort into writing opinions and likely greater influence on the development of the law.Previous research into judicial performance has relied upon much shorter time periods, and hence could not exploit the natural variation in employment conditions. In this project, researchers observe how individual judges alter their behavior, and hence are able to track the causal impact of the employment rule changes.This analysis can assist decision makers in crafting employment conditions that will allow for a more effective use of scarce public funds. Moreover, the rules for re-appointment rely upon different subjective measures of performance, and hence the project can provide insights into effective oversight of highly skilled employees, such as state appellate judges. More generally, the research will extend recent work in how incentive schemes can interact with intrinsic motivation or else distort allocation of effort across multiple professional tasks. For political economists, the results will be relevant to the study of the incentives in different electoral systems.The project will result in an original data set on judge employment conditions and judge performance that will be made available to interested researchers. This data set, and the resulting papers, will be of interest not just to economists but to a broad array of social scientists, legal scholars, and policy analysts.