Trial Court Judges Research Articles

Judges' Role Orientations, Attitudes, and Decisions: An Interactive Model

Despite almost two decades of behavioral research, our models relating the key variables in judicial decision making are incomplete and inadequate. In particular, the impact of two widely used variables, judges' attitudes and role orientations, is poorly understood. While there appears to be a consensus that attitudes and role orientations are important predictors of behavior, no research has been successful in developing a comprehensive model capable of predicting judges' behaviors. This article's objective is the development of a single model incorporating attitudes, role orientations, and decision-making behavior. While attitudes and role orientations taken singly explain insignificant amounts of the variation in behavior, an interactive model of attitudes and role orientations is shown to be extremely useful for understanding behavior. Although this research focuses on the sentencing decisions of Iowa trial court judges, the proposed model is potentially applicable to all instances of decision making.

Race, Recruitment, and Representation: Background Differences Between Black and White Trial Court Judges

D UUE TO a variety of historical forces, individual handicaps, and exclusionary practices, American blacks have been and currently still are underrepresented in the legal profession. Notable elsewhere, this underrepresentation is most severe at the capstone of the profession the judiciary.' Notwithstanding recent advances, the black bench remains a small but important and little understood political elite.2 While black judicial success is an achievement, judgeships are generally reserved for exceptionally qualified individuals. It has yet to be determined whether exceptional background characteristics and career patterns differ by judicial race.3 Utilizing detailed autobiographical statements, this issue is investigated for the sixteen black and seventy-nine white jurists serving on a major urban trial bench4 called for sake of anonymity, Metro City.5 Points of comparison include local and regional ties of the judges, their educations, prejudicial

Race, Recruitment, and Representation: Background Differences between Black and White Trial Court Judges

Race, Recruitment, and Representation: Background Differences between Black and White Trial Court Judges

Trial Courts in the Modern System of Criminal Justice

The Criminal Justice system has been criticized recently because of the lack of coordination among its parts. The current system is viewed by some to be operating in such a haphazard and unplanned fashion that it could more properly be characterized as a "nonsystemr." Because of this situation, trial court judges are being called upon to assume new responsibilities in the modern system of Criminal Justice. There have been calls for greater integration of the activities of the trial courts with those of the other segments of the Criminal Justice System. This greater coordination and closer interrelationship among the segments of the Criminal Justice System is supposed to alleviate the inefficiency in the current nonsystem and lead to smoother functioning, and a less expensive, Criminal Justice System. Though the benefits to be derived from the current evolution of Criminal Justice relationships is obvious, the potential hazards are in need of further study. After describing some of the current proposals for integrating the Criminal Justice System, this article will present and analyze some of the problems resulting from such proposals.