What Judges Want: Judges' Goals and Judicial Behavior

Abstract

Political scientists in the field of judicial politics' devote the largest portion of their collective effort to the explanation of judicial behavior They have made considerable progress, yet scholars in the field often express disappointment about our limited understanding of judicial behavior That disappointment is reasonable, in that we are far from fully comprehending the forces that shape what judges do. But students of judicial behavior have accomplished more than they realize, because the several useful strands of research on this issue have not been integrated as well as they might be Greater attention to integration is needed, particularly integration that is aimed at building theory. One promising approach to integration focuses on the goals of judges. Positive political theorists have demonstrated the utility of analyzing the behavior of policymakers in terms of the goals they seek to achieve. Goals have proved to be excellent building blocks for theories of policymaking most notably in research on Congress (Rieselbach 1992). This essay focuses on the relationship between judges' goals and judicial behavior The first section surveys what the existing scholarly literature on judicial behavior tells us about this relationship. In the second section I offer some thoughts about directions for future research.2 In the essay I distinguish between what might be called inherent and operative goals. Inherent goals refer to the ends that judges as people would like to achieve. The actual situations in which judges do their work can modify

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