Controlling for District Court Judges’ Preferences

This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges. Tests of these continuous measures against a null case fact specification suggest that the legal model always proves an effective predictor of decisions, but that ideological influences have incrementally grown throughout the last century. Continuous preference measures that assume a traditional norm of senatorial courtesy tend to be robust in limited samples of more recent outcomes. However, measures that account for cyclical changes in interbranch appointment relationships are more effective for temporally lengthy large N samples. The magnitude of these ideological effects is modest, but not unsubstantial. During the recent era of independent executive-vetting practices, the likelihood of a conservative decision is approximately 78 to 85 percent for Democratic appointees, and 85 to 90 percent for Republican appointees.