Affiliation:
1. Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract
Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts’ policy making efficacy, so why do judges allow it to happen? I show judicially-created policy can become inconsistent when judges explain rules in more abstract terms than they decide cases. To do so, I expand standard case-space models of judicial decision making to account for relationships between specific facts and broader doctrinal dimensions. This model of judicial decision making as a process of multi-step reasoning reveals that preference aggregation in such a context can lead to inconsistent collegial rules. I also outline a class of preference configurations on collegial courts (i.e., multi-member courts) in which this problem cannot arise. These results have implications for several areas of inquiry in judicial politics such as models of principal-agent relationships in judicial hierarchies and empirical research utilizing case facts as predictor variables.
Subject
Sociology and Political Science