Judges’ Rulings Follow Partisan Lines - NYTimes.com

Prof. Lee Epstein

All of us who struggle to preserve judicial independence (of whom? to what end?) recognize that who the decision-maker is makes a difference.  Oliver Wendell Holmes memorably made the point when he wrote the "the life of the law has not been logic but experience".   And our experience is that in close cases ideology matters - and in today's world the political parties are ideologically aligned.  Liberal Republicans are near extinction, and there are few Democrats who would call themselves conservative.  Professor Lee Epstein and  couple of high powered economics and law co-authors (Wiliam Landes and Richard Posner) look at the data in their new book The Behavior of Federal Judges.  Adam Liptak comments in the Times. - GWC
Judges’ Rulings Follow Partisan Lines - NYTimes.com: by Adam Liptak

A new book to be published in January by the Harvard University Press provides the most comprehensive and detailed empirical analysis yet of the role ideology and political affiliation plays in judicial decision making. It is called “The Behavior of Federal Judges,” and it collects and analyzes a daunting amount of data.Its authors are Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California; William M. Landes, who teaches law and economics at the University of Chicago; and Judge Richard A. Posner of the federal appeals court in Chicago. They conclude that “federal judges are not just politicians in robes, though that is part of what they are.”The book’s broadest findings are unsurprising but worth stating for those in denial about such things.“Justices appointed by Republican presidents vote more conservatively on average than justices appointed by Democratic ones, with the difference being most pronounced in civil rights cases,” the three authors write.

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