Judge (Ideology) Shopping

Abstract

In his first term in office, President Donald Trump appointed 174 judges to U.S. District Courts. We analyze the impact of these appointments on the ideology of the judges that helm the trial courts of the U.S. federal judiciary, as well as the ability of ideologically-motivated litigants to engage in "judge shopping." Using judge-level information on case assignment rates and ideology in an instrumented difference-indifferences approach, we show that Trump's appointments both shifted the ideology of the U.S. district court bench significantly to the "right" and increased litigants' ability to select a very conservative judge with high probability. The latter effect is driven by Trump's appointment of very conservative judges to seats in rural court divisions where all or substantially all cases have traditionally been assigned to a single judge. We present evidence that greater ability to engage in ideologicallymotivated judge shopping led to a large increase in civil rights case filings in impacted divisions, particularly cases concerning subjects with a recognized ideological valence, such as reproductive rights, religious liberty, and immigration. A simple counterfactual exercise reveals that randomizing case assignment at the judicial district level would reduce the number of politically motivated case filings by approximately 62% over a four-year period.

Keywords: Judge shopping, ideology, Trump, litigation, U.S JEL Classification: K4, O3