Choosing the next supreme court justice: An empirical ranking of judge performance

Author: Choi SJ / Gulati GM
Publication: Southern California Law Review
Topics: Legislation and Policy Social Science U.S./National
Keywords: independence judge productivity quality selection
Bibliographic information +

The authors propose a tournament based on relatively objective measures of judicial merit and productivity to test the politicians’ claims of merit during the selection of Supreme Court judges. They examine judges’ accomplishments on three dimensions: productivity, opinion quality, and judicial independence, using data on opinions authored by active federal circuit court judges between 1998 and 2000. Productivity is measured by counting the number of published opinions, quality’s proxies are invocation and negative citation by other judges, and judicial independence is assessed through the number of dissents and concurrences in which a judge opposed a judge of the same political party. The authors conclude that despite caveats of their methodology, hidden motives based on ideology in the current nomination process can be revealed.