“The Most Attractive Benefit”: Examining Motives for Federal Judicial Turnover

• In Event: Poster Session: State Politics and Policy & Law and Courts
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

This research uses data from surveys of federal judges conducted in 1988 and 2021 to assess judges’ reasons for taking senior status and whether they have changed over time. In the unpublished 1988 survey, many judges said that they retired in order to allow a new judge to be appointed and help reduce workloads of overwhelmed district courts, followed by personal health and familial health reasons. The current study recreated the original survey to facilitate comparison. We analyze whether judges have become more likely to cite political considerations given that federal judicial selection is increasingly intertwined with politics. We expect that contemporary judges are, in fact, more likely to acknowledge strategic motivations given the trend toward politicized judicial selection and turnover. However, we also expect to find persistent effects related to health issues, quality of life, and workload. Our survey results indicate that federal judges have become much more likely to cite political influences for leaving the bench, doing so at nearly twice the rate they did three decades ago.

Authors

• Richard L. Vining, University of Georgia

• Alyson Hendricks-Benton, University of Georgia