Abstract
We develop a model of opinion writing in the judicial hierarchy. The model adopts a case-space approach to judicial decision making with informational asymmetries across levels of the hierarchy. In the model, a lower court writes an opinion with two features: a legal rule and a level of quality. An upper court must then decide whether to review the decision. The model yields new insights about the strategic incentives created by the judicial hierarchy, including relationships among judicial ideology and opinion quality, judicial quality and the content of an opinion’s rule, and the effect of the case facts on these relationships. The findings suggest that several common tests employed in the literature may not discriminate among competing sets of first principles.
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