Getting Their Way: An Informational Theory of Deference in Appellate Review

• In Event: Models of Political Institutions

Abstract

Many court observers believe that district judges are able to "get their way" on individual cases, despite the fact that researchers have shown district judges to be more compliant and less subject to ideological influences than appellate judges. This presents a puzzle for scholars attempting to understand how much the idiosyncrasies of district judge adjudication influence legal outcomes. In this paper, I argue that a district judge's important role managing cases gives an overseeing appellate court an incentive to defer to district judges, even when decisions diverge from the appellate court's preferences. I analyze a model of adjudication by a district judge who exerts effort to resolve a case, but who is also constrained by the prospect of appellate review. I look at two informational environments---simple review and endogenous information---and thus provide an informational rationale for ex post deference to lower courts. I show that deference will be more common when district judges are more activist, but not too biased. Moreover, because district judges can freely alter the effort they exert to resolve cases, I also show that increasing an appellate court's ability to scrutinize a district judge's decision does not always improve welfare for the appellate court. I explore the implications of these results for a district judge's decision about when to issue a judgment on a case, and I relate this to empirical findings that claim district judges are largely compliant with appellate doctrine. In fact, the results from the model suggest that the judges adjudicating the kinds of cases in commonly used datasets may be different than those adjudicating a more representative sample of cases.

Author

• Ryan Hubert, University of California, Davis