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The Emerging Authority of Magistrate Judges within US District Courts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2022
Abstract
The federal judicial system is a hierarchy with district courts at the bottom, courts of appeals in the middle, and the Supreme Court at the top. A second, less visible, judicial hierarchy exists within district courts, with magistrate judges situated below district judges. Existing scholarship largely ignores magistrate judges, assuming they are agents tasked with procedural matters with little independent effect on federal courts adjudication. Using a combination of national administrative data (2000–2016) and original case-level data from nine district courts (1997–2014), we find that district courts not only grant meaningful responsibility and discretion to magistrate judges but do so in ways that vary substantially across and within districts. The effects of this judicial delegation extend from procedural rulings to substantive outcomes. Our findings provide evidence that a complete understanding of federal judicial decision making accounts for the roles—procedural and substantive—that magistrate judges perform.
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- © 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Footnotes
The authors presented an earlier version of this article at the 2019 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting and thank participants, in particular the discussant, Justin Wedeking, for their helpful feedback. Boyd acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation via grant no. SES-1626932. We also appreciate the excellent research assistance from Matt Baker, Caitlyn Kinard, Karson Pennington, Kiana Powers, Julianna Hightower, Alison Lamb, John Kirby, Jeanette Beltran, Julia Boll, Jay Bozza, Kate Kostel, Olivia Little, Isabelle Poore, Bradley Shanker, Danielle St. Amand, Max Simpson, Richy Wagner, and additional students listed on the project webpage (http://clboyd.net/SSAtrial.html). Replication materials for this article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/VCQOKM.
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