Measuring Judicial Effectiveness on US Courts of Appeal

• In Event: US Courts of Appeals: The Appellate Work Horses of the Federal Judiciary

Abstract

What makes for an effective and efficient judge and have these characteristics changed over time? With variable caseloads, advancing technology, and scarce personnel resources, the federal judiciary as a whole consistently face challenges in delivering justice to those who seek to achieve it. Especially in recent years when the Supreme Court agrees to review fewer cases (sometimes as few as 60 per term), federal circuit court judges face challenges of moving as many cases through the legal system as possible while doing their best to maintain their professional reputations. How might these pressures impact appellate judging? There are several important indicators of judicial behavior that can help law and courts scholars understand and catalog effective judging behaviors but we have yet to index these individual behaviors to create a reliable measurement for judicial effectiveness. In this paper I present a new solution to this measurement problem by introducing judicial effectiveness scores using a polit dataset of individual judge-level data from the Tenth, Fifth, and Seventh Circuits from calendar years 2016 through 2023.

Following extensive scholarship engaging with measuring productivity and policymaking of federal legislators (Volden and Wiseman 2014) and now state legislators (Bucchianeri, Volden, Wiseman), I extend Volden and Wiseman’s strategy of capturing measurement to the judiciary.
My measurement strategy culminates in what I term “judicial effectiveness scores” first focusing at the circuit court level of the federal judiciary. I present a strategy for calculating the annual productivity and the impact of judicial effort using a pilot study capitalizing on my original data collection effort cataloging eight indicators that together give scholars a reliable annual score of effective judging. I catalogue by individual circuit judge indicators including the number of cases in which each judge participated, the number of cases authoring the majority opinion, the number of cases authoring a non-majority opinion, the number of citations a judge received to previously authored work in that year, and the number of cases where the judge was overturned by the Supreme Court in that year. Also in the data I include 1) relevant biographic information about the judge including number of years in service and experience, 2) whether the cases were substantive or procedural, and 3) case-level categorization of policy issues using the Policy Agendas Project issue areas and WestLaw issue areas. As part of the weighting process I compare indicators for individual appellate judges to the other in-circuit judge’s indicators. The scores I calculate can also be used to compare average productivity across circuits as well.

The described measurement strategy presents several avenues of future research for judicial scholars to continue thinking about the political effects of judging but also presents an opportunity to engage in questions of cross-institutional governing and even the health of our political institutions broadly. In this initial paper, I examine the likelihood of a case being granted certiorari by the Supreme Court if the circuit court judge has a relatively high judicial effectiveness score.

Author

• Christine Bird, Oklahoma State University