Opinion Competition and Judge Replacement on Collegial Courts

Download or read book Opinion Competition and Judge Replacement on Collegial Courts written by Jud Mathews and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is common to think that replacing a judge with a new appointment nearer an ideological extreme will pull outcomes on the court in the ideological direction of the new appointment. This paper argues that this intuition is not always correct, at least for a class of close cases. The model developed here predicts that, in certain close cases, appointing a conservative (liberal) to replace a moderate may result in a loss for the court's conservative (liberal) wing. What drives this outcome is expressive costs: judges incur a cost for signing opinions distant from their own ideal points, so that a judge nearer the swing vote can better afford the compromises required to win. The model holds implications for judicial appointment strategies and helps explain findings that have puzzled other scholars.