Scholarship@WashULaw

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

Nevada Law Journal

Abstract

Do federal magistrate judges make different decisions and produce distinct judicial outputs from district judges? To provide initial empirical evidence on this question, this study utilizes federal district court data covering issue areas including employment discrimination, broader civil rights, intellectual-property rights, and personal-injury torts. The data indicate that magistrate judges are actively involved in civil cases, with as many as sixty-seven percent of cases having one or more magistrate judges serving in some role. These magistrate judges commonly preside over settlement conferences, decide discovery motions, issue reports and recommendations on dispositive motions, preside over status, management, and scheduling conferences, and serve as the assigned judge in the case by the consent of the parties. While there are numerous areas where there is no statistical difference in the outputs of magistrate judges and district judges, notable differences include grant rates of discovery motions, the likelihood of cases settling, appeal rates, the number of days to case resolution, the number of docket entries before case resolution, and the likelihood of opinion publication. The results may be due to differences in behavior between district judges and magistrate judges or, instead, may be driven by non-random opinion assignment practices.

This project also provides empirical insight into two additional, closely related questions. For the first question of whether prior experience as a magistrate judge affects district judge behavior, the data reveal that differences in settlement probabilities again emerge. The data also show a lower rate of report and recommendation non-adoption, and a higher number of words and citations per opinion among district judges with magistrate judge experience than those without that same background. For the second question of whether magistrate judges who receive future Article III district court appointments behave differently from their magistrate colleagues who do not, the data indicate that future district judges have higher grant rates on discovery motions and lower rates of appeal than other magistrate judges. There are also no instances in the data of these future appointees having their reports and recommendations not adopted. The article ends with an encouragement of additional data collection efforts on magistrate judges’ decisions and activities to further the systematic inquiry into this important subject.

Keywords

Magistrate Judges, District Judges, Judicial Behavior, Federal Courts, Case Management, Discovery Motions, Settlement, Opinion Writing, Civil Litigation, Empirical Legal Studies

Publication Citation

Christina L. Boyd, The Comparative Outputs of Magistrate Judges, 16 Nev. L.J. 949 (2016)

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