Judicial Decision-Making

Thanks to Matt Adler, Douglas Baird, Omri Ben-Shahar, Lee Fennell, Barry Friedman, Jake Gersen, Aziz Huq, Dan Kahan, Saul Levmore, Anup Malani, Tom Miles, Richard McAdams, Rick Pildes, Eric Posner, Jennifer Rothman, and David Strauss for helpful conversations and comments on an earlier draft, and to workshop participants at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, The University of Chicago Law School, and New York University Law School’s Constitutional Theory Colloquium. The latter workshop had to be cut short, and dramatically so, but Rick Pildes and David Golove made sure that I benefited from the participants’ generous attention to the Article. Hanna Chung and Daniel Roberts provided excellent research assistance. Mistakes are mine.

We thank Dawn M. Chutkow as well as participants in the Understanding Education in the United States Symposium at the University of Chicago Law School for comments on an earlier draft. Professor Sisk offers thanks to his assistant, Bethany Fletcher, for recording data coding and to law students Eric Beecher and Alicia Long for assistance with opinion coding. A spreadsheet containing our data set, regression run results, coding of each decision, coding of each judge, and code books may be found at http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/gcsisk /religion.study.data/cover.html.

We thank Rebecca Aviel, Ben Barros, Ursula Bentele, Peter Byrne, Michael Cahill, Ed Cheng, John Echeverria, George Fisher, Susan Herman, Brian Lee, Amnon Lehavi, Gregg Macey, Jonathan Masur, Jon Michaels, Eduardo Peñalver, Jim Pfander, Shelley Saxer, Nelson Tebbe, Jay Tidmarsh, Alan Trammell, and the faculty workshop participants at Vanderbilt Law School for helpful comments and conversations. We thank Liz Austin, Andrew Kenny, Tammy Wang, and the staff of the University of Chicago Law Review for truly fantastic editorial guidance. And we thank the Brooklyn Law School Dean’s Summer Research Stipend Program for its financial support.

We thank Jim Brudney, Annie Decker, Jeffrey Dobbins, Amanda Frost, Abbe Gluck, Helen Hershkoff, the Honorable Hans Linde (retired Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court), Jeffrey Pojanowski, David Pozen, and Mark Tushnet for incisive comments on earlier drafts; Michelle Anderson, Richard Schragger, Richard Briffault, Rick Hills, and Howie Erichson for conversations about aspects of this project; and Joseph Struble for research assistance. Portions of this Article were presented at the 2012 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, where the audience provided helpful feedback. Professor Leib also thanks the one hundred or so students in his Legislation classes at UC Berkeley and at UC Hastings who provided an answer on a final exam to the question of how, if at all, elected judges should interpret statutes differently from their federal counterparts.

For helpful comments, I thank Andrew Coan, Jim Hawkins, Toby Heytens, Randy Kozel, David Kwok, Anita Krishnakumar, Ethan Leib, Hillel Levin, Teddy Rave, Michael Solimine, audiences at South Texas College of Law and the University of Houston Law Center, and the editors of this journal. I thank David Klein and Stefanie Lindquist for sharing data that I used to perform some calculations in Part III.A. I thank Andrew Campbell and Kirsty Davis for research assistance.

Many thanks to Michelle Wilde Anderson, Will Baude, Josh Blackman, Sam Bray, Grace Bridwell, Craig Chosiad, Ryan Doerfler, Laura Donohue, Elliot Dorff, Greg Dubinsky, Kristen Eichensehr, Jonah Gelbach, Robert Goldstein, Mark Greenberg, Tara Leigh Grove, John McGinnis, Aaron Nielson, Jide Nzelibe, Jim Pfander, Alex Potapov, Sabeel Rahman, Larry Sager, Seana Shiffrin, Ganesh Sitaraman, Mila Sohoni, Sabine Tsuruda, Mark Tushnet, Margo Uhrman, David Waddilove, Eugene Volokh, Adam Winkler, Rebecca Zietlow, The University of Chicago Law Review, and participants in the Northwestern Constitutional Law Colloquium, the University of Pennsylvania Legislation Workshop, the Junior Scholars Federal Courts Workshop, and the UCLA School of Law Faculty Colloquium.

I have benefited from the incisive commentary of Todd Aagaard, Christine Bartholomew, Barton Beebe, Guyora Binder, Michael Boucai, Michael Coenen, Nicholas Day, David Engel, Richard Fallon, James Gardner, Jessica Greenberg, Jerry Mashaw, Hiroshi Motomura, Anthony O’Rourke, Nicholas Parrillo, Justin Richland, Cristina Rodríguez, Glen Staszewski, and Tico Taussig-Rubbo, as well as presentation participants at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, the Academia Sinica Institutum Iurisprudentiae, and the 2016 Law and Society Association conference.

Thanks to Brett Kavanaugh and John Manning; to Yale Law School students Julie Hutchinson, Aaron Levine, Scott Levy, Aviv Lipman, Leah Scaduto, and Kyle Victor; and to participants in presentations at The University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, and Yale law schools; and, as always, special thanks to Henry Monaghan.