State Court Judges Politically Biased in Election Disputes

Profs. Joanna Shepherd and Michael S. Kang (both of Emory), in cooperation with the American Constitution Society, recently published a comprehensive empirical study of state-court decisions in election cases. The result: State court judges are politically biased in these cases and thus favor their own party's interests in election disputes.

The study provides yet one more reason not to elect judges, especially in partisan elections.

The study, Partisan Justice: How Campaign Money Politicizes Judicial Decisionmaking in Election Cases, forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, is based on data from over 500 election cases from all 50 states from 2005 to 2014, including over 2,500 votes from more than 400 judges in state supreme courts.

The upshot:

Analyzing a new dataset of cases from 2005 to 2014, this study finds that judicial decisions are systematically biased by these types of campaign finance and re-election influences to help their party's candidates win office and favor their party's interests in election disputes.

The study finds that judicial partisanship is significantly responsive to political considerations that have grown more important in today's judicial politics. Judicial partisanship in election cases increases, and elected judges become more likely to favor their own party, as party campaign-finance contributions increase.

But "[t]his influence of campaign money largely disappears for lame-duck judges without re-election to worry about."