Students of the judicial process have focused considerable attention on the relationship between judges' background characteristics and their voting behavior on collegial courts. The argument for such a focus is that background characteristics are usually indicative of particular socialization processes and that these processes produce certain attitudes which are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for the judges' votes. Thus these characteristics can be viewed, in the aggregate, as predictive of judges' behavior-at least in certain types of cases. Research into the connection between background characteristics and judicial voting behavior has produced some positive results. Most frequently noted is the relationship between partisan affiliation and direction of vote in a wide variety of cases by judges on state supreme courts and federal courts of appeals (Ulmer, 1963; Goldman, 1966; Nagel, 1970: Chapter 14). Religious differences have also been found to be related to judges' voting behavior in some types of caseJ (Vines, 1964; Goldman, 1966; Nagel, 1970: Chapter 18). Two scholars have found that judges' career patterns have been related to their voting behavior (Danelski, 1964; Vines, 1965) and there is some evidence linking judges' educational experience with their behavior (Nagel, 1970: Chapter 18). Some scholars, investigating the relationship between dissensus on collegial courts and variation in judges' background characteristics, have offered evidence supporting (in part at least) the proposition that the latter is productive of the former (Schmidhauser, 1962; Ulmer, 1970; Jaros and Canon, 1971).1 Such linkages, however, areby no means solidly established. The investigators noted above, particularly Goldman (1966) and Nagel (1970: Chapter 18), as well as others (Bowen, 1965; Grossman, 1967; Adamany, 1969) have noted the tenuous nature of these findings and have in some cases offered contrary evidence.