The Illusion of Judicial Consensus Revisited: Partisan Conflict on an Intermediate State Court of Appeals

Abstract

The decision-making tendencies of judges on intermediate state appellate courts have not been frequently studied because these courts issue few nonunanimous decisions. The high proportion of unanimous decisions has led scholars to presume that these courts are engaged primarily in routine error correction of trial court decisions and that judges' political and social background characteristics cannot therefore be important factors affecting this level of appellate review. Rather than analyze the voting tendencies of individual judges, however, this study examines the outcomes of decisions made by three-judge appellate panels in a large sample of unanimous and nonunanimous cases considered by the California Courts of Appeal from 1970 to 1983. Although nearly 90 percent of these decisions were unanimous, significant variation was found in the outcome of intermediate appellate court decisions, depending upon the partisan composition of the panel and the party affiliation of the justice assigned to write the majority opinion.

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