Institutional Influences on Appellate Panels: Presiding Justice and Opinion Justice Effects, and Perceptions of Israel Supreme Court Justices

Abstract

Prior studies of 1410 mandatory jurisdiction and 48 discretionary jurisdiction criminal law case outcomes in cases decided by the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 have shown differences in the rates at which individual justices vote for the state or for defendants. They have also provided evidence of a mismatch between justices’ voting patterns in this mass of criminal cases and the legal community’s perceptions about justices’ voting behavior. A panel’s presiding justice and the justice who writes a case’s opinion may influence other justices’ votes, which would make raw votes noisy signals of justices’ true preferences. This paper explores the relation between voting patterns and the justices who preside and who write opinions in a case. We compare justices’ voting patterns in cases in which they preside and write opinions with their voting patterns in cases in which they do not preside or write opinions. We also compare the voting patterns of non-presiding, non-opinion-writing justices in cases in which a justice does and does not preside or write the opinion. With one exception, we find no significant difference in justices’ voting patterns across presiding and non-presiding status. For some justices, their own voting patterns and the non-opinion justices’ voting patterns differ in cases in which a justice writes the opinion and cases in which the justice does not sit. This is likely due to the nonrandom process of opinion assignment. Overall, we find little evidence that the institutional features, presiding justice and opinion justice status, mask the true preferences of justices. The paper then assesses whether perceptions of justices are better explained by their behavior in cases in which they write opinions than by their votes in the mass of cases. Perceptions of at least one justice may be better explained by cases in which she wrote opinions than by her votes in the mass of cases.