Experts in Crime: The Effect of an Exclusively Criminal Docket on Judicial Behavior

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association

Scholars of state courts and judicial behavior have shown that variations in the institutional environment and political context in which judging occurs can significantly alter voting behavior. Here we focus on how the composition of a court's docket can alter behavior. In this paper we use a potential outcomes framework to exploit a unique institutional configuration in the Texas and Oklahoma Criminal Courts of Appeal dockets: exclusive and singular criminal jurisdiction. Using multivariate matching, we control for a host of potentially confounding factors and estimate the effect of docket composition on judicial choice. We find that the two state supreme courts with unique jurisdictions behave differently than do state supreme courts with more diverse dockets.