Expertise and Judicial Opinion Assignments on the Courts of Appeals
Abstract: This Paper examines the role of expertise in judicial opinion assignment and offers three contributions. First, I develop a general theory of opinion assignment on multimember courts. Second, I use that theory to predict how expertise might influence opinion assignment. Third, the Paper identifies a setting in which the theory the Paper advances should have observable implications, and the paper proceeds to test those implications empirically: It finds that, in the years following the initial adoption of the Sentencing Guidelines, judges who were Sentencing Commissioners were more likely to have opinions raising sentencing issues assigned to them. Fourth, because the theory advanced in the Paper suggests that the courts of appeals are far more likely to witness experience-based opinion assignment than is the Supreme Court, the Paper contributes to an understanding of opinion assignment practices in this under-studied area.
