https://www.benjaminlauderdale.net/categories/courts/ Recent content in Courts on Benjamin Lauderdale Hugo en-GB Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benjaminlauderdale.net/publications/refugee-roulette-revisited-judicial-preference-variation-and-aggregation-on-the-swiss-federal-administrative-court-2007-2012/ Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benjaminlauderdale.net/publications/refugee-roulette-revisited-judicial-preference-variation-and-aggregation-on-the-swiss-federal-administrative-court-2007-2012/ <p>While many democracies nominate partisan judges, empirical research has struggled to assess whether such judges adhere to Aristotle’s maxim that like cases should be treated alike. One fundamental problem hindering empirical research is that many courts only report decisions of panels, not the opinions of individual judges. We propose a methodology that tests which of several decision-theoretic models of group decision-making best fit the panel decisions, infers judges’ individual preferences, and quantifies the proportion of cases that would be decided differently if the courts’ consensus were consistently applied (an inconsistency rate). Applying this methodology to the Swiss asylum appeal process, where cases are assigned conditionally at random and have a common, unidimensional structure, we find a persistent inconsistency rate of about 5% due to variation in decision-making between judges, and that judges’ estimated preferences are correlated with party membership in expected ways.</p> https://www.benjaminlauderdale.net/publications/the-effects-of-panel-assignment-on-the-us-court-of-appeals-in-death-penalty-cases/ Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benjaminlauderdale.net/publications/the-effects-of-panel-assignment-on-the-us-court-of-appeals-in-death-penalty-cases/ <p>We use the quasi-random assignment of cases to three-judge panels on the US Courts of Appeals to assess the consistency of adjudication of death penalty appeals. We find clear evidence that panels apply different standards depending on whether a majority of the panel was appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents. Unlike previous work on panel effects in the US Courts of Appeals, we show that these effects persist to the end of the process of adjudication. Since the the early 1980s, the probability of ultimate execution has been increased for inmates when their first Court of Appeals case was assigned to a panel with a majority of Republican appointees.</p>