The Impact of Formal Selection Processes on the Characteristics of Judges — Reconsidered

Students of the judicial process have focused considerable attention on the relationship between judges' background characteristics and their voting behavior on collegial courts. The argument for such a focus is that background characteristics are usually indicative of particular socialization processes and that these processes produce certain attitudes which are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for the judges' votes. Thus these characteristics can be viewed, in the aggregate, as predictive of judges' behavior — at least in certain types of cases.