Law & Economics Workshop

presents

Thomas Miles

University of Chicago Law School

Judging the Voting Rights Act

(co-authored with Adam Cox)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

12:30 – 2:00

Solarium (room FA2)

84 Queen’s Park

The Voting Rights Act has radically altered the political status of minority voters and dramatically transformed the partisan structure of American politics.  Given the political and racial salience of cases brought under the Act, it is surprising that the growing literature on the effects of a judge’s ideology and race on judicial decision-making has overlooked these cases.  This Article provides the first systematic evidence that judicial ideology and race are closely related to findings of liability in voting rights cases. Democratic appointees are significantly more likely than Republican appointees to vote for liability under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  These partisan effects become even more prominent when judges appointed by the same president sit together on panels.  Moreover, a judge’s race appears to have an even greater effect on the likelihood of her voting in favor of minority plaintiffs than does her political affiliation: minority judges are more than twice as likely to favor liability.  This finding contrasts starkly with prior studies of judicial decision-making – studies finding that, across a range of legal questions, a judge’s race has only a weak effect, if any, on the resolution of cases.  As with partisanship, the so-called “panel effects” of race are strong, as white judges become substantially more likely to vote in favor of liability when they sit with minority judges.  These findings have significant implications for a number of controversies, including debates about which institutions are best situated to protect minority voting rights and disputes about the role of diversity within the federal judiciary.

Thomas Miles is an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, and he writes primarily in the areas of judicial decision-making and criminal justice.  Tom received his B.A. in Political Science and Economics, summa cum laude, from Tufts University. After college, he was a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he received the Bank President's Award for Outstanding Achievement.  Tom was a doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 2000.  He received his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2003.  Tom served as a law clerk to the Honorable Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  Before joining the faculty, he was the Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the Law School.  He currently teaches federal criminal law, torts, and economic analysis of law, and he is an editor of The Journal of Legal Studies.

A light lunch will be served.

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.