Judges Judging Judges: Partisanship and Politics in the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals

Alma Cohen and Rajeev Dehejia

No 19487, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We examine how politicization and polarization influence judicial review within U.S. Federal appellate courts. Analyzing over 400,000 cases from 1985 to 2020, we find that judges' political alignment or misalignment with trial judges increasingly affect their decisions, particularly in the last two decades. This trend is significant in precedential cases: panels of Democratic judges are 6.9 percentage points more likely to reverse Republican trial judges compared to Democratic ones, whereas Republican panels are 3.6 percentage points less likely to reverse fellow Republican judges. This effect persists across ideological and non-ideological cases and even among judges appointed before 2000.

Keywords: Judicial; decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H0 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19487 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19487

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().