The Prestige and Influence of Individual Judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Judicial scholars have often recognized that prestige seems to vary among judges, but they have not devoted much systematic attention to the phenomenon or its consequences. In this article, we develop a measure of prestige and calculate prestige scores for a sample of 139 federal circuit court judges. We then test the validity of our measure by determining how strongly the scores correlate with other variables, some of which are expected to be related to prestige, others of which should be unrelated. Finally, we incorporate our measure into an analysis of judicial influence, asking whether novel legal rules are more likely to be adopted by other circuits if announced by highly esteemed judges than if announced by less prestigious ones. The evidence suggests that our measure is valid and that prestige can translate into influence.