Âé¶¹ÒùÔº

June 14, 2022

Political ideology influences management decisions such as mask wearing in federal judiciary, study finds

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
× close
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Federal district judges appointed by Republican presidents were found to be less likely to require mask wearing in the courtroom during the COVID-19 pandemic, finds a new study from the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. The results are published in the SSRN Electronic Journal.

"We find strong evidence that political ideology influenced management of the judiciary during the : Republican-appointed chief judges were less likely to require masks to be worn but more likely to suspend in-person trials," wrote the authors of the study, "Political Ideology and Judicial Administration: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic." The study was published online June 9 in the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper series.

"The main takeaway is that we find strong evidence that influenced management of the judiciary during the pandemic," said Kyle Rozema, associate professor of law and one of four co-authors on the paper. "The results suggest that chief judges made different choices about how to trade off concerns over health and the procedural rights of litigants during the pandemic."

The researchers focused on the 24 states that have multiple districts as a way to parse out the impact of a judges' ideology from requirements issued by state governments. The study looked at data from March 2020 to July 2021.

"Most on judicial ideology examines the role that ideology plays in case outcomes," Rozema said. "The purpose of the project is to use one setting—the policies adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—as an opportunity to study whether the political preferences of judges influence their management choices. This is a broad question about the role that ideology plays in the judiciary beyond just case outcomes that has not been studied much empirically. Our findings thus provide some of the first evidence that ideology may be an important force in the administration of the federal judiciary."

Get free science updates with Science X Daily and Weekly Newsletters — to customize your preferences!

Some key findings:

"Our results suggest that, on average, Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed chief judges adopted different strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic," the authors wrote. "Republican-appointed chief judges decided to not require masks to be worn in courthouse as frequently, but they were also less likely to hold in-person trials.

"Democratic-appointed chief judges placed greater importance on holding in-person trials, but they did so while requiring masks to be worn in courthouses. In short, based on their ideology, chief judges made different choices about how to trade off concerns over health and the procedural rights of litigants in the judicial system."

More information: Adam Chilton et al, Political Ideology and Judicial Administration: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic, SSRN Electronic Journal (2022).

Load comments (0)

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's and . have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Get Instant Summarized Text (GIST)

This summary was automatically generated using LLM.