ELS
03 18 2010 10:42:16
Studying Federal Judicial Decisionmaking Studies
«An interesting paper by Pauline Kim (Wash U), How Should We Study District Judge Decision-Making?, urges judicial decisionmaking scholars to distinguish federal trial and appellate judges on institutional grounds.
Her thesis raises important research design issues. An excerpted abstract follows. "Too often, empirical studies of the district courts rely on an implicit assumption that judging at the trial court level is fundamentally the same as judging at the appellate level.
We argue that this approach is misguided, because the nature of district judges' work is substantially different from that of appellate judges. For example, unlike in the typical appellate case, a district judge may rule in a single case on multiple occasions and on different types of questions, only a few of which could be dispositive but all of which affect the case's progress and ultimate outcome.
In this Essay, we argue for a new and more suitable approach to studying decision-making in the federal district courts - one that takes into account the trial level litigation process and the varied nature of the tasks judging in a trial court entails.»...
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