Decision Making in the Federal Judicial Hierarchy

摘要联邦司法制度的一个显著特征是其等级结构；这种结构塑造了法官的目标，并引起了对监督（下级法院）和遵守（高等法院）的关注。这些因素反过来又与案件和法官两级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，后者既考虑“向上看”（监督）的行为，也考虑“向下看”（遵守）的行为；理想情况下，这样的模型还必须在三个等级之间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变化。我们建立了这样一个模型，并通过分析1953年至2005年美国最高法院审理的所有联邦地区法院案件中所有参与联邦法官在每个下级法院诉讼程序中的行为来分析其含义。通过在每个案件中对司法层级的不同级别进行数据编码，我们的方法允许我们在给定的案件背景下检查司法投票，从而保持可能影响司法决定的特定案件因素的范围不变。此外，广义层次和混合模型的最新进展允许灵活地说明法官和法院特定影响的相互作用，包括由于法官对监督、合规或两者的潜在关注而与层次效应相关的影响。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年里做出的每一个案件中，每一位联邦法官做出的每一个决定进行全面的统计；因此，这些数据将为学者们研究美国联邦法院法官的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.