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SSRN-Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary by Daniel Katz, Derek Stafford
"Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary.
Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the "natural" Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.
Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of "degrees" is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions. "
SSRN-Defining and Measuring Judicial Activism: An Empirical Study of Judges on the United States Courts of Appeals by Corey Yung
Existing empirical scholarship about judicial activism has almost exclusively focused on the United States Supreme Court and actions by the judiciary that invalidate legislative, executive, and state actions. This article contends that such limitations gi
SSRN-The Consequences of Immigration Reform for the US Courts of Appeals by Chad Westerland
In this paper, I examine the consequences of the changes in the administrative procedures for appeals in immigration cases for circuit court judges. I discuss these changes and offer a model of decision making in immigration appeals. By analyzing a newly
SSRN-Using an Ethnographic Method to Explore Administrative Justice by Laverne Jacobs
This chapter is an excerpt from a study in which an ethnographic methodology was used to explore the concept of "tribunal independence" within access to information and privacy commissions in Canada. This chapter sets out the theory behind the ethnographi
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