Anup Malani, "Understanding Judicial Decision-making"

Anup Malani, “Understanding Judicial Decision-making: A review, recent results, and an agenda”

It is thought to be a truism that judges cite and follow precedent. Clearly judges cite prior cases, but do they really follow precedent or cherry pick cases that support their conclusions? And how do we square these truisms with evidence that judges are political? Professor Malani surveys what the legal and political science literature has discovered about judicial decision-making and talks about his work studying federal circuit splits to understand whether and how judges rely on precedent.

Anup Malani is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

This talk was recorded on November 3, 2015, as part of the Chicago’s Best Ideas lecture series.