Abstract
Though judges face a professional obligation to decide cases
according to pre-existing law, scholars of judicial politics have
provided considerable evidence that they do not always do so, and
instead often decide cases on the basis of their personal policy
preferences. What factors explain whether or not judges follow the
law? Prior research addressing the question of why independent
judges defer to law is conflicted between legalist theories, which
argue that judges hold strong internalized personal values that
favor deference to law, and institutional theories, which argue
that judges obey law because they are constrained by institutional
arrangements and face potential consequences if they do not. In
this project, I develop a theoretical framework for discriminating
between these two accounts. I examine this question in the context
of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, where the difficulties associated
with consistently applying the law to every case are highly acute
due to use of the three-judge panel system, where different,
randomly selected groups of judges decide each case. Taking
advantage of institutional diversity among the twelve U.S. Courts
of Appeals, I assess whether the presence of institutions that
provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer oversight of panel
decisionmaking is associated with greater deference to law. Using
data on the incidence of rehearings of panel decisions by a full
court en banc, and on patterns of citation among Courts of
Appeals panels, I provide evidence consistent with the
institutional account and inconsistent with the legalist
account.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Self-Policing on Collegial Courts 42
3 Better Oversight or Better Judging? Internal Reforms and En
Banc Review 70
4 Institutions, Ideology, and Precedent 96
5 Institutions and Law 128
About this Dissertation
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