Christina L. Boyd

She’ll Settle It?

Relying on research that posits that female leaders and managers will be more likely than men to adopt a management style that favors participation, collaboration, and consensus building, I argue that female district court judges, using this style in their case management environments, should be more likely than their male colleagues to successfully foster intracourt case settlements. To test this, I compile data from nearly 18,000 civil rights and tort cases terminated in four federal district courts across 9 years. The regression and duration analyses provide confirmation that the sex of a case’s assigned judge matters, with female judges successfully fostering settlement in their cases more often and more quickly than their male colleagues. In addition to having significance for litigants, these findings have broad implications for female decision makers across different institutions and organizations as well as the future of the judging profession and diversity appointments to the judiciary.

The Role of Law Clerks in the U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda-Setting Process

Do law clerks influence the decisions made by justices on the U.S. Supreme Court? Although numerous studies of law clerk influence exist, none has controlled for alternative factors that lead a justice to behave in a particular way even absent the actions of the law clerk. Turning to the Court’s agenda-setting stage, we draw from archival materials contained in the private papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun to address this precise issue. Our results suggest that once a justice’s initial voting inclinations in a case are controlled for, the ability of a law clerk to systematically alter a justice’s vote is conditioned on the quality of the petition, the direction of the clerk’s recommendation, and the ideological closeness of the pool clerk and voting justice. Given the closeness of many agenda-setting votes, we suggest that clerk influence could be the determining factor in whether a case is granted review by the Court.

Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court data set of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to lay the foundation for a more precise and useful taxonomy of federal litigation than has been previously available, one that, after the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009), has also arguably never been more relevant than it is today.

Representation on the Courts? The Effects of Trial Judges' Sex and Race

Scholars have long sought to resolve whether and to what degree political actor diversity influences the outputs of political institutions like legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. When it comes to the judiciary, diverse judges may greatly affect outcomes. Despite this potential, no consensus exists for whether judicial diversity affects behavior in trial courts -- i.e., the stage where the vast majority of litigants interact with the judicial branch. After addressing the research design limitations in previous trial court-diversity studies, the statistical results here indicate that a trial judges sex and race have very large effects on his or her decision making. These results have important implications for how we view diversity throughout the judiciary and are particularly timely given the Obama Administrations nearly 200 female and minority appointments to the federal trial courts.

Opinion Writing in the Federal District Courts

American trial court judges’ roles and behavior vary greatly from their appellate court brethren. One such area of difference has to do with opinion writing behavior, an area where trial judges hold a great deal of discretion in determining whether to write an opinion and, if they do, how long the opinion should be. To examine what factors determine opinion writing behavior among district court judges, this study relies on analyses of an original dataset of civil cases that terminated in eighteen federal district courts from 2000 to 2006. The results indicate that legal, hierarchical, and institutional features are critical in motivating opinion writing and opinion length and that personal factors have very limited effects. The fruits of this exercise have important implications for how we view and model the behavior of trial court judges in the future.

Adjudicatory Oversight and Judicial Decision Making in Executive Branch Agencies

Adjudications are an important, though understudied, means through which administrative agencies create policies that have a lasting impact. We argue that executive branch agency heads utilize their oversight of agency adjudications to advance agency goals. Relying on an original data set of adjudications appealed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency head’s adjudication delegee, our empirical results indicate a substantial positive effect on the probability that the agency head will reverse an administrative law judge (ALJ) when he receives the appeal of an antiagency ALJ decision. However, the agency’s adjudication oversight is conditional on political constraints, including partisanship differences between an agency and the litigated law and whether the case is being heard during a time of presidential transition. These results have clear implications for the use and effectiveness of agency adjudications as a political tool.

The Political Responsiveness of Violent Crime Prosecution

Is a federal prosecutor’s decision whether to pursue violent crime charges political? While prosecutors frequently assert their decision-making independence, their selection and operational constraints suggest a very different story. We assess whether political factors related to the prosecution priorities of the president, Congress, and the local public affect federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline charges in violent crime matters. To empirically examine this, we utilize data from 89 U.S. Attorneys offices from 1996 to 2011. The results provide rich new insight into when and why federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions are driven by the preferences of the president, Congress, and the local public. The findings also have important broader implications for the role of political factors in a U.S. criminal justice system believed by many to be in crisis.

Placing federal district courts in the judicial hierarchy

OF THE DISSERTATION Placing Federal District Courts in the Judicial Hierarchy by Christina L. Boyd Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Washington University in St. Louis, 2009 Andrew D. Martin, Chair Over forty years after Richardson and Vines (1967) complained that federal courts “have seldom been investigated as a system of interactions,” the same problem continues to plague judicial scholarship, particularly concerning federal district courts. Viewed as the sum of its three essays, this dissertation project seeks to remedy this deficit. The project relies on the collection and coding of thousands of case dockets, opinions, and other court documents across multiple years (2000-2006 for essay 1, 2000-2004 for essays 2 and 3), nearly 30 district courts, and numerous issues areas that together account for about 40% of federal district court civil filings. The project evaluates three questions related to placing placing district courts in the judicial hierarchy. Question 1 tests the influence of case developments and actor characteristics on the disposition method (settlement, non-trial adjudication, and trial) and winning party in district court civil cases. With Question 2, I examine what features lead to a change in a case’s winning party and disposition method after the case has been appealed and remanded back to the district court. Finally, Question 3 models the decision of a losing litigant to appeal to the courts of appeals and captures the implications of this decision for the outcome of the case on appeal. The result is that this project provides unprecedented insights into the development of law, the strategies of parties, the managerial role of judges, the influence