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Using an original data set of around 70,000 civil rights cases heard by nearly 200 judges, we study the effect of presidential appointments to federal district courts. We provide the first causal estimates of whether lawsuits end differently depending on their assignment to either a Democratic or a Republican appointed judge. We show Republican appointees cause fewer settlements and more dismissals, favoring defendants by around 5 percentage points. We estimate a similarly sized effect for a sample of civil rights appeals heard in the Ninth Circuit, raising questions about the conventional wisdom that politics matters more at higher levels of the judicial hierarchy. We also find that the effect in district courts has increased over time. For cases filed during the Obama presidency, Republican appointees caused pro-defendant outcomes in 7.4% more cases than Democratic appointees. Our results suggest that district courts are an important—although neglected—subject of research for political scientists. [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]

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines represent a uniform set of formal rules that are implemented across a broad range of diverse social contexts. Drawing from neo-institutional theory and kindred perspectives on criminal courts, we argue that the federal courts represent an organizational field in which local influences play a key role in conformity to institutional rules. We use unique survey data from federal judges, aggregated to the district court level and combined with individual-level federal sentencing data, to examine hierarchical models of judicial departures from the Guidelines. Our analysis includes more proximate measures of court community culture than prior research. We find that the collective views of federal judges, including their perceptions of the degree of regulative constraint posed by the Guidelines, as well as the extent to which the Guidelines are normatively and morally legitimate, are intimately related to variation in judicial Guidelines departures across district courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1938 diversity jurisdiction case Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (Erie) in relation to a debate about whether a U.S. federal district court that is hearing a case under its diversity jurisdiction is required to use the preliminary injunction standard that would be applied by a court of general civil jurisdiction where the federal court is located. American civil procedure, forum shopping, and legal presumptions are assessed.

The article presents proposals for reducing inconsistency in social security cases in U.S. federal district courts. Topics include the calls for social security reform in the U.S. in 2014, how the federal judiciary processes Social Security disability benefit appeals, and the power of precedent. Information is provided on how to increase social security law interpretation consistency in district courts.

The decision of the Second Circuit in United States v. Finnerty (Finnerty lit) was the culmination of a number of District Court decisions that found that specialists on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) could not be held liable for fraud under Rule 10b-5 for interpositioning, whereby they put themselves between buy and sell limit orders, in violation of NYSE rules, and profited on the spread. Finnerty III and its District Court sibling decisions were wrongly decided. Specialists presented a uniquely thorny issue of agency law to the Federal Courts in New York. This issue was under-analyzed by the Federal Prosecutors and left the courts without a coherent theory of fiduciary duty for specialists. This Note will demonstrate that there is a fiduciary relationship between specialists and their public customers and will untangle that relationship to show that it prohibits interpositioning and that interpositioning was fraud under Rule 10b-5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the split between district courts in nations over the ordering of restitution in child pornography possession cases. It offers brief information on the developments of the problem, along with the analysis how federal courts have dealt restitution in possession cases particularly on the role played by proximate causation in a court's final disposition on restitution. The calculation of restitution awards in possession cases and other derivative issues are discussed. Also explores are the constitutional dimensions of restitution awards and its risks in violation the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines.

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 case Vaden v. Discover Bank, wherein the plaintiff questions if federal courts have subject-matter jurisdiction to entertain petitions to compel arbitration under the section 4 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in the U.S. The Supreme Court (SC) clarified that parties can request for a federal district court to enforce arbitrary agreement under section 4 petition. Thus, SC might also clarify state courts' responsibilities over arbitrary agreement if necessary.

Does the hierarchical relationship between the district courts and the courts of appeals influence decision making at the trial level? Do these judges anticipate responses by appellate panels and condition their decisions based on these expectations? Using a sample of district court cases from 1925 to 1996 that were subsequently reviewed by the courts of appeals, and incorporating a strategic choice statistical framework, I discover that the district courts are constrained by the anticipated responses of the appeals courts. However, this conclusion is not apparent if one analyzes the data using traditional maximum likelihood methods. Only when empirical analyses specifically model underlying strategic relationships does one discover this constraint. If the federal trial judges anticipate a negative response on appeal, then they curtail their ideological influences (the magnitude of influence decreases by approximately one-half). This pattern remains consistent when one examines civil liberties and economic cases, but not for criminal cases. Thus, the hierarchical structure of the federal judiciary appears to exert a significant constraint on the district courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the use of cameras in courtrooms as the most effective means of providing public access in the U.S. The author refers to the issued statement from the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council which allowed the limited use of cameras in federal district courts within the circuit on an experimental basis. Upon the non-court trials, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court has also approved but not on Internet broadcasting because of possible legal technicalities.