An Empirical Analysis of Conservative, Liberal, and Other Biases in the United States Courts of Appeals for the Eighth & Ninth Circuits

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to analyze the effect of several attributes of a trial judge on whether the judge is reversed by the Circuit Court of Appeals. I consider—the party of the trial judge, the gender of the trial judge, whether the trial judge was active or not (i.e., whether the judge was senior status with a reduced load), the number of appeals taken from the judge’s decisions that year, the type of case appealed, and the interactions of the above factors. I conducted this analysis for the most liberal and the most conservative United States Courts of Appeals with the hope of revealing some differences between them. Some expectations proved true—others not, and other unforeseen patterns emerged. And both the predicted and surprising patterns are able to inform us, even assuming a lack of consensus on cause, because they frequently can assist in predicting appellate outcomes.