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Magistrate judges function as a shadow judiciary, assisting U.S. district court judges--and sometimes standing in their shoes--in managing caseloads, resolving disputes, making law, and choosing winners and losers. Yet we lack basic knowledge about magistrates themselves, the rules that govern their activity, and the ways in which they execute their duties. To fill those gaps, this Article offers a detailed typology of the district-level local rules and standing orders that govern magistrate operations in civil cases. It also describes a case study of ten years of magistrate practice in a single federal district court, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in resolving summary judgment motions. The case study reveals that the involvement of a magistrate makes a difference to the outcome, and that the way that a magistrate became involved (by automatic operation of court rules, by consent of the parties, or by the discretion of the district judge) matters as well. Further, case characteristics such as claim complexity and plaintiffs' pro se status amplify magistrate judge effects while others weaken it. We also observe the effects of district judges' race, age, and experience on the bench on case referrals and adoptions of magistrates' recommendations. These findings suggest multiple avenues for future research, nationwide, to understand the complexities of the interactions between magistrates and district judges, and the role of magistrates more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common law style of judging appears to be on its way out. Trial courts rarely shape legal policymaking by asserting decisional autonomy through distinguishing, limiting, or criticizing higher court precedent. In an earlier study, we demonstrated the reluctance of lower court judges to assert decisional autonomy by invoking the holding-dicta dichotomy. In this Article, we make use of original empirical research to study the level of deference U.S. district court judges exhibit toward higher courts and whether the level of deference has changed over time. Our analysis of citation behavior over an eighty-year period reveals a dramatic shift in judges' practices. In the first fifty years included in our study, district court judges were not notably deferential to either their federal court of appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court. District court judges regularly assessed the relevance and scope of precedents from those higher courts and asserted their prerogative to disregard many of them. Since then, judges have become far more likely to treat a given higher court precedent as dispositive. In so doing, lower courts have embraced a hierarchical view of judicial authority at odds with the common law style of judging. The causes of this shift are multifold and likely permanent; we discuss several of them, including dramatic changes in legal research, the proliferation of law clerks throughout the legal system, the growing docket of lower court judges, the growth of the administrative state, and the Supreme Court's increasing embrace of judicial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author talks about the recollections of how the circuit and district court functioned in courthouse at Seventh and Mission Streets in San Francisco. Topics discussed include his experience as U.S. Ninth Circuit judge; mention of Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co. court case; and functioning of the courthouse.

In the wake of United States v. Booker and Gall/Kimbrough v. United States, sentencing researchers and legal scholars conducted research designed to identify their impact on the federal sentencing process, with a focus on determining whether the decisions increased unwarranted disparity. In this article, we extend this body of research. Using 10 years of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and data from other sources, we assess whether and how these decisions influence sentence severity. Results indicate that sentence severity declined following Booker and, especially, Gall/Kimbrough, but that the decisions’ effects on sentence severity varied significantly across U.S. District Courts. Most importantly, the impact of Gall/Kimbrough sentence severity was conditioned by districts’ percent Black population, level of socioeconomic disadvantage, and degree of political conservatism; each of these factors moderated the decisions’ effects on the harshness of the sentences imposed by the districts’ judges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal aspects related to the Hatch-Waxman Act for generic drugs in eastern districts of Virginia. Topics include the Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for generic drugs which requires approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the good speed of trial in the courts of the eastern districts of Virginia as compared to the U.S. District Courts and the Federal Circuit, and experienced judges for patent related cases in eastern Virginia courts.

The article offers information regarding various contributions and personality of the late Judge Ronald N. Davies during his tenure as a judge at the North Dakota District Court. It discusses several court cases of the U.S. related to Davies' career including Aaron v. Cooper, Stromsodt v. Parke-Davis & Co., and Merchant National Bank & Trust Co. v. United States. Also discusses brief information regarding the case related to the Little Rock School District.

In this article the author discusses the arguments concerning the right to wear the niqab in the U.S. courtrooms. The author mentions the lawsuit filed by Ginnah Muhammad in federal district court against Judge Paul J. Paruk alleging that the latter had violated the right of the former to exercise the religion freely and access the courts. He says that the individuals who refuse to remove the religious headgear are excluded from courtrooms across the U.S.

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 parsimony provision contained in 18 U.S.C. § 3553 (a) directs district courts to impose a sentence sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to effectuate the statutory goals contained in section 3553 (a)(2). The parsimony limitation and the substantive reasonableness review analyzed by Justice Scalia in Rita make clear that district judges do not have the unfettered discretion to sentence within the statutory range that they enjoyed prior to the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act. If a non-elemental fact is significant enough to effect an increase in the sentence that would be parsimonious as to the offense simpliciter, the Sixth Amendment applies to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the author at a swearing-in ceremony in the Michigan District Court in which he reflects on transitioning from lawyer to judge. In the ceremony he also shares examples of the necessary challenges, humility, and compassion that come with being a judge in the U.S., and discussed role of judges the in bringing justice.