Search

The current study aims to examine the joint effects of defendant race and gender on (1) downward sentencing departures (likelihood and length) and (2) upward sentencing departures (likelihood and length) in federal criminal courts. Using federal criminal cases sentenced between October 1, 2014 and September 30, 2016, a series of multivariate logistic and ordinary least squares regression models are used to isolate the effects of defendant race and gender (and their intersections) on departure decisions. Findings indicate that greater punitiveness for minorities in departure decisions are exclusive to Black males. Further, females of all race/ethnic groups examined are consistently advantaged in departure decisions when compared to White men. Findings regarding Hispanics indicate little difference in departure decisions compared to Whites, but where differences exist it is to the advantage of Hispanics. Findings and implications are discussed in light of focal concerns perspective and prior research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the demographics of federal district court judges in the 10th Circuit. Consistent with the literature regarding the glass-ceiling effect in positions of power and influence in the legal profession, the study finds that women judges are under-represented on the 10th Circuit bench compared with their numbers as lawyers in the jurisdictions of the Circuit. However, the study finds that ethnic minority judges are over-represented in the Circuit. The essay next explores the relationship between under-representation, over-representation, discrimination and judicial "catch up": addressing historical and contemporary under-representation by means of temporary over-representation of qualified under-represented groups on the bench. It argues that under-representation that cannot be explained in terms of merit criteria or informed opting out strongly suggests the lingering effects of past discrimination, as well as the current effects of implicit bias. Such past explicit and present implicit discrimination ought to shift the burden of addressing under-representation to the institutional players involved in the judicial commission process, who should temporarily deploy over-representation to break through the glass-ceiling and catch up the disparity. The feasibility of such a judicial catch up is evidenced by the over-representation of ethnic minority judges in the 10th Circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment scholars acknowledge the fundamental importance of both prosecutorial discretion and jurisdictional variation in punishment; yet, little is known about the extent to which charging practices vary across court contexts. This is especially true in the federal criminal justice system. This research investigates this issue by linking four years of charging data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) to corresponding data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC). It incorporates unique information on district court contexts from a variety of sources to investigate jurisdictional variation in charge reductions. Findings provide evidence that federal charging practices vary across district courts. In particular, several structural court characteristics are significantly related to the likelihood of charge reduction for similarly-situated defendants. Results from this study are interpreted through the lens of contemporary legal perspectives on court communities and suggest several fruitful directions for additional research on the social contexts of criminal prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test the proposition that litigation outcomes in the Ninth Circuit are significantly more activist and liberal on all federal court cases filed over a 20-year time period in which a U.S. executive agency, the USDA Forest Service, was a defendant in a lawsuit challenging a land management decision. Our results reveal that the Ninth Circuit was not significantly more likely to reverse agency decisions in the liberal direction; however, the District Courts located in the Ninth Circuit were. Additionally, opinions that all Circuits', including the Ninth Circuit, judicial panels opted to publish were significantly more likely to reverse agency action and be in the liberal direction. One consistent and statistically significant finding was that any reversal of agency action, not just those that are published, were much more likely to be in the liberal direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a federal bankruptcy judge's grant of chapter 9 protection to the City of Detroit, Michigan, in December 2013, came questions regarding the bankruptcy's implication for myriad stakeholders. Though media attention focused primarily on bondholders, labor unions, and pensioners, one stakeholder received comparatively little attention—the 36th District Court. Located in Detroit, the Court, one of the nation's largest and busiest, is funded via a model requiring local government responsibility for sizable contributions to local courts. As this type of funding model is not unique to Michigan, we analyze key issues presented by the Detroit case in the context of the funding model, and implications not only for it but for other states using similar models, both in terms of court administration and larger issues inherent in federal forms of government such as separation of powers and inherent powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have expressed concern over the working conditions of federal district court judges who face comparatively low salaries in contrast to those in peer professions. As a means of enticing new judges of the highest quality, Chief Justices Rehnquist and Roberts have urged Congress and the president to increase judicial pay. However, scholars have not conducted a systematic, empirical investigation of whether higher salaries do, in fact, attract better prospective judges. We turn our attention to this issue. We first develop an exhaustive dataset of ABA ratings for over 1,800 nominees to the federal district courts from 1964 to 2012. We next model the effects of salary on the quality of nominations and confirmations. We find that salary is an important determinant of both the quality of candidates nominated and those confirmed to the federal bench. Our findings have critical implications for public policy, as our results confirm the need for better pay for federal judges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American trial court judges’ roles and behavior vary greatly from their appellate court brethren. One such area of difference has to do with opinion writing behavior, an area where trial judges hold a great deal of discretion in determining whether to write an opinion and, if they do, how long the opinion should be. To examine what factors determine opinion writing behavior among district court judges, this study relies on analyses of an original dataset of civil cases that terminated in eighteen federal district courts from 2000 to 2006. The results indicate that legal, hierarchical, and institutional features are critical in motivating opinion writing and opinion length and that personal factors have very limited effects. The fruits of this exercise have important implications for how we view and model the behavior of trial court judges in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study seeks to determine if the partisan affiliation (Democrat or Republican) of a plaintiff challenging a local, state, or federal campaign finance policy influences the case votes of U.S. district court judges. Using an original database of campaign finance cases decided between 1971 and 2007, I find that judges do not systematically favor challenges filed by plaintiffs who share the judge's partisan affiliation. However, judges are statistically less likely to favor challenges filed by plaintiffs who are members of an opposing major political party. These results indicate that plaintiffs who do not share a judge's partisan affiliation are at a disadvantage when challenging campaign finance policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our analysis of federal district court decisions in USA PATRIOT Act cases after September 11 shows that while district courts exhibit great deference to the executive during times of war, especially in terrorism threat and immigration cases, they are not inclined to protect civil rights and liberties during times of domestic or international conflict. While judicial ideology does not influence case outcomes, the presence of a civil-libertarian interest group decreases the chance of a deferential decision, and a more conservative Senate and president increases the chance of judicial deference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the conditions under which Congress passes jurisdiction-granting legislation, which expands the discretion of the federal district courts by designating them as policy venues. This project extends existing research that has demonstrated that Congress manipulates the parameters of jurisdiction by examining how Congress routinely engages in this activity. I construct and evaluate a comprehensive data set of laws in which Congress grants jurisdiction to the district courts for the period between 1949-2006 (81st-109th Congress). I consider the effect of separation-of-powers and ideological distance on the decision to grant jurisdiction. The results demonstrate that both separation-of-powers and ideological concerns influence such decisions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern federal district courts delegate vast decision-making powers throughout criminal and civil cases to magistrate judges--judicial actors that, unlike other federal judges, serve without an Article III political appointment. Through the lens of principal-agency theory, this study seeks to rectify the relative paucity of systematic work on these actors by using original filing and motion-level district court data to examine magistrates' decision making empirically. Our results support our expectations that magistrates are often constrained by the preferences of the district judges in and the institutional characteristics of their district while issuing reports and recommendations and serving as assigned judges by the consent of the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bail Reform Act of 1984 changed the law dictating release and detention decisions in federal court. Since its passage, few studies have examined judicial decision-making in this context. Legal research enables us to account for the structure and interpretation of federal detention laws and to analyze previously neglected measures of legal factors in our analyses. We use US Sentencing Commission data on a sample of defendants who were sentenced in 2007 (N = 31,043). We find that legal factors—particularly length of criminal history, having committed a violent or otherwise serious offense, and having committed the offense while under supervision of the criminal justice system—have the strongest relationships with the presentence detention outcome. A defendant’s age, race, and ethnicity have weaker relationships with detention. When we compare defendants who are similarly situated with respect to legal factors, the probability of detention is similar regardless of age, race, and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several federal district courts in 2009 and 2010 interpreted a relatively obscure provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to grant a potentially broad right of attribution to owners of copyright in creative works. The statutory provision prohibits removal or alteration of copyright management information. The law gives reason for both hope and fear for news organizations. On one hand, an attribution requirement is seen by some in the news industry as relief from negative effects of technology, including online news aggregators. On the other hand, news organizations already have been sued under the copyright management provision for their conduct in newsgathering. This article examines the copyright management information provision and concludes that transformation will be a key consideration in balancing the interest in attribution with preservation of newsgathering's reliance on access to and fair use of copyright-protected works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges. Tests of these continuous measures against a null case fact specification suggest that the legal model always proves an effective predictor of decisions, but that ideological influences have incrementally grown throughout the last century. Continuous preference measures that assume a traditional norm of senatorial courtesy tend to be robust in limited samples of more recent outcomes. However, measures that account for cyclical changes in interbranch appointment relationships are more effective for temporally lengthy large N samples. The magnitude of these ideological effects is modest, but not unsubstantial. During the recent era of independent executive-vetting practices, the likelihood of a conservative decision is approximately 78 to 85 percent for Democratic appointees, and 85 to 90 percent for Republican appointees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the important goals of the federal sentencing guidelines was to reduce inter-judge disparity in sentencing. In this paper, we test the assumption that structuring discretion produced uniformity in federal sentencing and consistency in the process by which judges arrive at the appropriate sentence. We also examine whether background characteristics of judges affect the sentences they impose on similarly situated offenders. We used hierarchical linear modeling, nesting the offenders in the judges that sentenced them in order to examine the sentencing decisions of federal judges in three U.S. District Courts. While we found that significant variation between judges in sentencing is largely accounted for by our level 1 characteristics, we also found that judges arrive at decisions regarding the appropriate sentence in different ways, by attaching differential weights to several of the legally relevant case characteristics and legally irrelevant offender characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the transcript of the Hiss-Chambers court case of December 1948, wherein the plaintiff indicted a respected diplomat and foundation executive Alger Hiss for perjury by a U.S. District Court Grand Jury in New York. The court's examination of Hiss's denial of allegations of espionage for the Soviet Union in 1938 is reviewed. Details are given describing elements of how the Grand Jury addressed the issues and comments are provided on the resulting conviction and imprisonment of Hess.

Patent law and practicing before the specialized courts that deal with patent applications is an area of legal practice demanding expertise and often hidden from the public with little media coverage given to other areas of law. Yet, despite this relative obscurity, patent rulings can have a significant implications for the both the applicant and societal welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]