(Download) "Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the United States Courts of Appeals. (Part 1)" by Missouri Law Review " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the United States Courts of Appeals. (Part 1)
- Author : Missouri Law Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 470 KB
Description
The results of this analysis differ dramatically from those of prior judge ranking studies. (111) The top ten percent of the rankings (roughly ranks 1-40) contains some well-known judges, such as now-Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as Judges Henry Friendly and Kenneth Starr, among others. In addition, the top of the rankings contains some names that also stood out in Choi and Gulati's measure, such as Judge Bruce Selya of the First Circuit. But most of the names at the top are not very familiar, such as that of first-place Judge William Riley of the Eighth Circuit. Similarly, the bottom of the ranking contains some notoriously ideological judges but also contains some judges who are surprising to see at the bottom of a quality ranking. Overall, most of the judges fall into a rather large group in the middle and are not statistically distinguishable from one another. To compare the results with those of Choi and Gulati in the context of more recent judges, consider Table III, which presents the "composite" ranking from Choi and Gulati's "tournament" (112) side-by-side with the rankings from Table II. Because Choi and Gulati ranked a much smaller number of judges, only 95 of the 383 are presented, with their ranks renumbered accordingly. Comparing the two tables suggests that there is no visible relationship between the Choi and Gulati rankings and the quality rankings as computed in this study. Some of the lowest judges in Choi and Gulati's ranking, such as Judge Stanley Marcus of the Eleventh Circuit and Judge Karen Henderson of the D.C. Circuit, come out near the top of this Article's ranking.