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The Future Matters: Judicial Preferences Over Legal Rules and Decision-Making on Collegial Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Caitlin Ainsley ,
Cliff Carrubba  and
Georg Vanberg
Caitlin Ainsley
Affiliation:
University of Washington, USA
Cliff Carrubba
Affiliation:
Emory University, USA
Georg Vanberg*
Affiliation:
Duke University, USA
*
Contact the corresponding author, Georg Vanberg, at georg.vanberg@duke.edu.
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Abstract

High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. Focusing on this fact, we provide microfoundations for judicial preferences over legal rules by deriving them directly from expectations about the distribution of future cases. Doing so has important consequences: in contrast to standard assumptions in models of judicial decision-making, preferences over legal rules are asymmetric rather than symmetric. We demonstrate that this has significant implications for judicial decision-making on collegial courts. Finally, we show that changes in the case distribution—for example, as a result of technological change—can lead to significant legal change, even in the absence of ideological or doctrinal change on the court.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
© 2021 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Kevin McGuire, Chuck Cameron, Lewis Kornhauser, and John Kastellec for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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