Papers / Abstracts
Scherer, Nancy and Banks Miller. “The Federalist Society’s Impact on the Federal Judiciary.” Political Research Quarterly (forthcoming, 2008)
Only twenty-five years after its founding, the Federalist Society today boasts a nationwide membership including renowned attorneys, politicians, policy-makers and jurists. Although the Society maintains that it is not a political organization, liberal political activists claim that the Society has long pursued an ambitious—and extremely conservative—political agenda. In this article we ask: Do members of the Federalist Society decide cases in a more conservative manner than other non-member jurists? Using a data on decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, we find Federalist Society members are significantly more conservative than non-members and examine the long-term implications of our study.
Box-Steffensmeier, Janet, Suzanna De Boef, Anand Sokhey and Banks Miller. “Repeated Events Data and the Conditional Frailty Models: A Foster Care Application.” Under Review.
Scholars studying child welfare outcomes have focused on the factors that lead to “churning,” or repeated entries into and placements within foster care systems. However, understanding the dynamics of such instability is not an easy task, for matters are complicated by the fact that both a child’s history and their unique characteristics play a part in the process – factors which enter the world of statistics as event dependence and unobserved heterogeneity, and that can produce serious inferential difficulties when examining duration data. Accordingly, in this paper we introduce the conditional frailty model for survival analysis, outlining its benefits in comparison to other approaches commonly used to examine repeated events processes. In arguing for the superiority and generalizability of our approach, we apply it to multiple data sets on the Tennessee foster care system, finding 1) evidence of event dependence when it comes to both repeated spells in foster care and repeated placements within spells, and 2) both event dependence and unobserved heterogeneity when it comes to placement instability. While making the case for our methodological tack, we situate the findings in the literature on child welfare, highlighting the substantive payoffs of the approach, and noting how the insights gained can aid policymakers and analysts in their work.
Curry, Brett and Banks Miller. “Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places? Foreign Law and Support for the U.S. Supreme Court.” Politics and Policy (forthcoming, 2008)
References to foreign legal judgments in several recent Supreme Court decisions have given rise to substantial legal and political controversy. While those debates have largely focused on normative matters, we utilize an experimental design to assess the implications of this issue for the Court and its legitimacy with the public. We find that, although reliance on foreign law increases support for specific court decisions, the Court’s citation of foreign law simultaneously decreases support for the Court as an institution. Further, our results indicate that the Supreme Court’s reliance on foreign law is particularly powerful in structuring the opinions of citizens who are less knowledgeable about government and the Court.
Miller, Banks and Brett Curry. “Expertise, Experience and Ideology on Specialized Courts: The Case of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.”
Using a dataset of obviousness patent cases from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spanning 1997-2006, we explore the role of expertise in decision making on a specialized court of appeal. We find that ideology plays an important role in decision making on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and that expertise mediates the role of ideology in decision making. Further, we find that the level of expertise enjoyed by the authority being reviewed is also a factor in judicial choice.
Miller, Banks, Dino Christenson and Brett Curry. “Experts in Crime: The Effect of an Exclusively Criminal Docket on Judicial Behavior.”
Scholars of state courts and judicial behavior have shown that variations in the institutional environment and political context in which judging occurs can significantly alter voting behavior. Here we focus on how the composition of a court’s docket can alter behavior. In this paper we use a potential outcomes framework to exploit a unique institutional configuration in the Texas and Oklahoma Criminal Courts of Appeal dockets: exclusive and singular criminal jurisdiction. Using multivariate matching, we control for a host of potentially confounding factors and estimate the effect of docket composition on judicial choice. We find that the two state supreme courts with unique jurisdictions behave differently than do state supreme courts with more diverse dockets.
Miller, Banks and Brett Curry. “Experts Reviewing Experts: Agency Review on a Specialized Court.”
What role does judicial subject matter expertise play in the review of agency decisions? Is the role of judicial expertise moderated by significantly by the expertise of the agency whose decision is under review? Using a data set of decisions in which the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences is reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit we investigate these questions.