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

在普通法司法管辖区，上诉法官以以前的判决为基础，使用以前法官所描述的事实、推理和结果来指导他们的裁决，从而随着时间的推移构建法律规则。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，上诉法官的表现在一定程度上取决于他们的雇用条件。在美国各地，法官的选择、补偿和留用的规则因州而异，对于最佳的前进道路没有达成共识。这项研究试图通过衡量定义这些方案的规则的离散变化对法官表现的影响来探索不同的司法选择、补偿和保留方案的重要性。为此，该项目将建立一个关于州上诉法官雇用规则和业绩的新数据集。该数据集将包括1947至1994年间所有州上诉法院案件的信息。由于州立法而导致的就业条件的变化被用作“自然实验”，以梳理出就业规则和各种绩效指标之间的关系。聘用规则包括法官工资、法官任期地位、法官留任程序和任期。绩效衡量标准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对意见的引用次数。对这些变量的较高衡量反映了法官在撰写意见方面所做的更大努力，可能对法律的发展产生了更大的影响。以前对司法表现的研究依赖于更短的时间段，因此无法利用就业条件的自然变化。在这个项目中，研究人员观察了个别法官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，以便更有效地利用稀缺的公共资金。此外，重新任命的规则依赖于不同的主观绩效衡量标准，因此该项目可以提供对高技能员工(如州上诉法官)的有效监督的见解。更广泛地说，这项研究将扩展最近的工作，即激励计划如何与内在动机相互作用，或者扭曲多个专业任务之间的努力分配。对于政治经济学家来说，这些结果将与不同选举制度下的激励机制研究相关。该项目将产生一组关于法官聘用条件和法官表现的原始数据，并将提供给感兴趣的研究人员。这些数据集和由此产生的论文不仅会引起经济学家的兴趣，而且会引起广泛的社会科学家、法律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.