There is a wealth of scholarship examining how judicial attitudes affect appellate decision-making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the attitudes of trial judges. While there is some scholarship examining the objective actions of trial judges, there is very little examining how their...

Although federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over bankruptcy cases, once a petition is filed the matter is referred to the Bankruptcy Court, an Article One court of limited jurisdiction and limited judicial independence. Among proceedings the Bankruptcy court can adjudicate are core...

This is a collaborative study examining the relationship between popular reality-based judge television shows, 'tort tales,' and the politics of tort reform. TV judge shows share or approximate many features of the tort tale described by Haltom and McCann in Distorting the Law: Politics, Media,...

This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges (1901-2006). Tests of these continuous measures against a null case fact specification suggest that the legal model always proves an...

In this paper I build on previous research by exploring gender differences in judging on state supreme courts while controlling for ideology and institutional features. This paper provides an important contribution to the study of gender and judging by examining a large number of votes for a...

We intend in this project to show that the severity of felony sentences imposed by elected trial court judges in the state of Washington is highest in court districts where constituents are disposed toward a punitive approach to combating crime and lowest in districts favoring more leniency in...

Recent trends in judicial elections, including expensive rough-and-tumble campaigns characterized by televised attack advertising and politicized discourse, are causing advocacy groups and legal scholars to condemn the practice of electing judges. This paper addresses an important aspect of this...

The Framers of the Constitution thought so highly of the right to trial by jury that they put it in the body of that document. Likewise, James Madison and the First Congress mentioned it twice in the Bill of Rights for much the same reason. Trial by jury to them meant a delicate and important...

Electoral incentives dictate that “the people's” representatives are primarily concerned with securing reelection. Can this expectation be applied to non-representative offices such as State Supreme Court justices? A majority of states use elections to choose non-policymakers such as State...

Scholars of American political development have noted that under some conditions, people of color have gained significant rights advances in the United States during and immediately after wartime crises based upon their crucial contributions to the war effort. This paper considers this process...