Article

What Matters: Agreement Between U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges

Daniel L. Chen, Xing Cui, Lanyu Shang, and Junchao Zheng

Abstract

Federal courts are a mainstay of the justice system in the United States. In this study, we analyze 387,898 cases from U.S. Courts of Appeals, where judges are randomly assigned to panels of three. We predict which judge dissents against co-panelists and analyze the dominant features that predict such dissent with a particular attention to the biographical features that judges share. Random forest, a method developed in Breiman (2001), achieves the best classification. Dissent is predominantly driven by case features, though personal features also predict agreement.

Replaces

Daniel L. Chen, Xing Cui, Lanyu Shang, and Junchao Zheng, What Matters: Agreement Between U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges, TSE Working Paper, n. 16-747, December 2016.

Reference

Daniel L. Chen, Xing Cui, Lanyu Shang, and Junchao Zheng, What Matters: Agreement Between U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2016.

Published in

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2016