Politics and judgment in federal district courts

Are appointment politics and court decisions linked? Do presidents use judicial appointments to shape their policy agendas? C. K. Rowland and Robert A. Carp provide definitive answers to these questions and, in the process, offer a new paradigm for the study of judicial fact finding. Working from interviews and more than 45,000 court rulings from 1933 to 1988 - the largest and most current database available - Rowland and Carp document the undeniable link between politics and jurisprudence in the federal lower courts. Rejecting the reductionist attitudinal (or behavioral) model of judicial fact finding for a new one based on social cognition, they argue that trial judges' decisions are not mechanically motivated by the policies and ideologies of the judge or the judge's appointing president.