Deborah Beim

The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases

We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel—and the potential for dissent—plays a significant role in judicial decision making. Second, because of the relationship between panel composition and panel outcomes, considering only the incidence of dissents dramatically underestimates the influence of the institution of dissent—judges dissent much less frequently than they would in the absence of this relationship. Third, this rarity of dissent means they are informative: when judges do dissent, they influence en banc review in a manner consistent with the preferences of full circuits. Taken together, these results have important implications for assessing legal consistency in a vast and diverse judicial hierarchy.

Learning in the Judicial Hierarchy

I argue the Supreme Court learns to craft legal rules by relying on the Courts of Appeals as laboratories of law, observing their decisions and reviewing those that best inform legal development. I develop a model that shows how the Supreme Court leverages multiple Courts of Appeals decisions to identify which will be most informative to review, and what decision to make upon review. Because an unbiased judge only makes an extreme decision when there is an imbalance in the parties’ evidence, the Supreme Court is able to draw inferences from cases it chooses not to review. The results shed light on how hierarchy eases the inherent difficulty and uncertainty of crafting law and on how the Supreme Court learns to create doctrine.

Why Do Courts Delay

Answering one question often begets another. We present a decision-theoretic model that describes how this affects the sequencing of decisions over time. Because answering an easy question may raise a more difficult one, a rational judge may delay resolution even if he has perfect information about the correct decision. Furthermore, because otherwise unrelated questions may raise similar follow-ups, he may optimally clump decisions together. Our theory thus generates an endogenous economy of scale in dispute resolution and contributes to the literature on punctuated equilibrium theory. We illustrate the results of our model with a case study from legal history in the United States.