When Do Judges Explain Themselves?

• Activity Number: 205
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 7, 2006 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Business and Economics Statistics Section
• Author(s): Alan Izenman*+ and David Hoffman
• Companies: Temple University and Temple University
• Keywords: statistics and the law ; judicial decisions ; case complexity index ; censored data ; predictors ; opinion or order

Abstract

An important topic of interest to legal scholars is under what conditions will a judge decide to write an opinion in a case, instead of merely an order. Such an "opinion or order" decision tends to be reflected in whether the decision is published by either Westlaw or Lexis. To investigate the conditions under which a judge decides to write an opinion or an order in each case, we collected a large number of predictor variables related to the status of each judicial decision in a large random sample of civil cases from each of four jurisdictions, Maryland, California (ND), Pennsylvania (ED), and New York (SD), during 2003. Certain of these cases had not yet ended at the time of data collection, and so get treated as censored data. We describe a model that helps us deal with the complicated aspects of this question, and we present a "complexity index" for each case.