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From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fates of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed and debated explanations of judicial behavior. This book examines the major issues in the debates over how best to understand judicial behavior and assesses what we actually know about how judges decide cases. It concludes that we are far from understanding why judges choose the positions they take in court. Lawrence Baum considers three issues in examining judicial behavior. First, the author considers the balance between the judges' interest in the outcome of particular cases and their interest in other goals such as personal popularity and lighter workloads. Second, Baum considers the relative importance of good law and good policy as bases for judges' choices. Finally Baum looks at the extent to which judges act strategically, choosing their own positions after taking into account the positions that their fellow judges and other policy makers might adopt. Baum argues that the evidence on each of these issues is inconclusive and that there remains considerable room for debate about the sources of judges' decisions. Baum concludes that this lack of resolution is not the result of weaknesses in the scholarship but from the difficulty in explaining human behavior. He makes a plea for diversity in research. This book will be of interest to political scientists and scholars in law and courts as well as attorneys who are interested in understanding judges as decision makers and who want to understand what we can learn from scholarly research about judicial behavior. Lawrence Baum is Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University.

Public health legal powers are increasingly under pressure from the courts in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals and organizations successfully challenged many community mitigation orders (for example, mask mandates, vaccination mandates, and restrictions on gatherings), demonstrating the legal vulnerability of disease control measures. Analyzing 112 judicial decisions in which the plaintiff prevailed from March 2020 through March 2023, we examined the ways in which courts constrained public health powers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that in these 112 decisions, courts shifted how they analyze religious liberty claims and reviewed challenges to the exercise of statutory powers by health officials in novel ways. We discuss implications for public health policy going forward, and we recommend ways in which legislatures and health officials can design policies to maximize their prospects of surviving legal challenges.

In the United States, the public has a constitutional right to access criminal trial proceedings. In practice, it can be difficult or impossible for the public to exercise this right. We present JUSTFAIR: Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records, a database of criminal sentencing decisions made in federal district courts. We have compiled this data set from public sources including the United States Sentencing Commission, the Federal Judicial Center, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, and Wikipedia. With nearly 600,000 records from the years 2001-2018, JUSTFAIR is the first large scale, free, public database that links information about defendants and their demographic characteristics with information about their federal crimes, their sentences, and, crucially, the identity of the sentencing judge.

Objectives. To describe minors’ use of judicial bypass to access abortion and the percentage of bypass petitions denied in Florida and Texas. Methods. Data were derived from official state statistics on judicial bypasses and abortions by age in Texas and Florida; abortions in Texas among minor nonresidents were estimated. In addition, judicial bypass petitions as a percentage of abortions received by minors and judicial bypass denials as a percentage of petitions were calculated. Results. Between 2018 and 2021, minors received 5527 abortions in Florida and an estimated 5220 abortions in Texas. Use of judicial bypass was stable at 14% to 15% in Florida and declined from 14% to 10% in Texas. Among petitions for judicial bypass, denials increased in Florida from 6% to a maximum of 13% and remained stable in Texas at 5% to 7%. Conclusions. Minors’ use of judicial bypass in Texas and Florida is substantial. The percentage of denials is higher and increasing in Florida. Public Health Implications. Minors who need confidential abortion care may now be forced to seek judicial bypass far from home. Parental involvement laws in states that do not ban abortion will compound barriers to abortion care. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(3):316–319. https://doi.org/10.2105/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307173 )

This article assesses the arbitration regimes of Indonesia and China, focusing on the judicial roles and their implications for the effectiveness of international arbitration. Employing a comparative legal methodology, this study reveals that although judicial support is essential for effective arbitration, its characteristics differ across the two jurisdictions. The differences lead to significant convergence and divergence of their judicial roles in arbitration proceedings. Indonesia’s arbitration framework aims to strike a balance between national legal norms and global arbitration standards, whereas China’s hybrid approach combines strong support for arbitration with deliberate judicial intervention. The analysis provides valuable insights into how Indonesia and China, respectively, work to strengthen arbitration as a fair, efficient, and reliable dispute-resolution forum. In conclusion, although the roles of Chinese and Indonesian judicial support and interference vary, their overall direction aligns with the global pro-arbitration movement. The two jurisdictions exhibit a trend in which courts are increasingly not rivals to international arbitration but rather guarantors of its effectiveness.

When areas of the law are ambiguous or untested, such as in the compassionate release cases that proliferated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, district judges must rely on their discretion to fill in legal gaps. Discretion can be beneficial, because it means that it allows district judges to consider factors that may lead to potentially harmful outcomes for litigants or their communities. But discretion is imperfect, particularly in the face of ethically or factually complex problems. Perhaps a place to start with addressing this difficulty is greater transparency about the benefits and limitations of discretion.

One-hundred-and-sixty jury-eligible participants read a vignette describing a male who was brought to the attention of police for suspicious and aggressive behaviours and displayed atypical behaviours in court. Half of participants were informed that he had autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and were given background information about ASD; the other half received no diagnostic label or information. The provision of a label and information led to higher ratings of the defendant’s honesty and likeability, reduced blameworthiness, and resulted in fewer guilty verdicts, and more lenient sentencing. Thematic analysis revealed that participants in the label condition were more empathetic and attributed his behaviours to his ASD and mitigating factors, while participants in the No label condition perceived the defendant as deceitful, unremorseful, rude and aggressive.

Many important social and policy decisions are made by small groups of people (e.g., juries, college admissions officers, or corporate boards) with the hope that a collective process will yield better and fairer decisions. In many instances, it is possible for these groups to fail to reach a decision by not garnering a minimum number of votes (e.g., hung juries). Our research finds that pivotal voters vote to avoid such decision failure—voters who can “tip” their group into a punishment decision will be more likely to do so. This effect is distinct from well-known social pressures to simply conform with others or reach unanimity. Using observational data from Louisiana court cases, we find a sharp discontinuity in juries’ voting decisions at the threshold between indecision and conviction (Study 1). In a third-party punishment paradigm, pivotal voters were more likely to vote to punish a target than nonpivotal voters, even when holding social information constant (Study 2), and adopted harsher views about the target’s deservingness of punishment (Study 3). Using vignettes, we find that pivotal voters are judged to be differentially responsible for the outcomes of their votes—those who “block” the group from reaching a punishment decision are deemed more responsible for the outcome than those who “fall in line” (Study 4). These findings provide insight into how we might improve group decision-making environments to ensure that their outcomes accurately reflect group members’ actual beliefs and not the influence of social pressures.

This paper summarizes key shifts in judicial decisions relating to public health powers during the pandemic and the implications of those decisions for public health practice. Then, it gives a preview and call for partnership in developing a legal framework for authority that guides public health to better activities, processes, and accountability in service of the public’s health.