Decision Making in the Federal Judicial Hierarchy

联邦司法系统的一个标志性特征是它的等级结构;这种结构塑造了其中法官的目标，并引起了对监督（下级法院）和遵守（上级法院）的关注。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，对联邦系统中司法决策的完整描述必须考虑到具体案件、具体法官和等级效应的影响，而等级效应既考虑到“向上看”，也考虑到“向上看”。（监督）和“向下看”（合规）行为;理想情况下，这种模型还必须在三个层次上一致地测量这些因素，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，并分析其影响，通过分析的行动，所有参与的联邦法官在每个下级法院的诉讼程序中决定的所有案件在美国最高法院起源于联邦地区法院从1953年至2005年。 通过在每个案件中的司法层次的各个级别的编码数据，我们的方法使我们能够在给定的情况下，检查司法投票，从而保持不变的范围内的具体案件的因素，否则可能会影响司法判决。 此外，最近在广义等级和混合模型方面取得的进展允许灵活规范法官和法院具体影响的相互作用，包括由于法官对监督、遵守或两者的潜在关切而产生的等级效应。 最后，我们收集数据的最终结果将是对美国最高法院在过去50年中判决的每一个案件中每一位联邦法官所做的每一个决定的全面核算;这些数据将为学者们研究美国联邦法院的法官判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.