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Motivated reasoning in the field: polarization of prose, precedent, and policy in U.S. Circuit Courts, 1891–2013
Full text linkThis study explores politically motivated reasoning among U.S. Circuit Court judges over the past 120 years, examining their writing style and use of previous case citations in judicial opinions. Employing natural language processing and supervised machine learn- ing, we scrutinize how judges’ language choices and legal citations reflect partisan slant.
Our findings reveal a consistent, albeit modest, polarization in citation practices. More notably, there is a significant increase in polarization within the textual content of opin-ions, indicating a stronger presence of motivated reasoning in their prose. We also exam-ine the impact of heightened scrutiny on judicial reasoning. On divided panels and as midterm elections draw near, judges show an increase in dissent votes while decreas-ing in polarization in both writing and citation practices. Furthermore, our study explores polarization dynamics among judges who are potential candidates for Supreme Court promotion. We observe that judges on the shortlist for Supreme Court vacancies demonstrate greater polarization in their selection of precedent
Mood and the malleability of moral reasoning: the impact of irrelevant factors on judicial decisions
No full textEmotions are said to underlie moral decision-making. We detect intra-judge variation spanning three decades in 1.5 million judicial decisions driven by factors unrelated to case merits. U.S. immigration judges grant an additional 1.4 % points of asylum petitions–and U.S. district judges assign 0.6 % points fewer prison sentences and 5 % longer probation sentences—on the day after their city's NFL team won, relative to days after the team lost. Bad weather has the opposite effect of a team win. Unrepresented parties in asylum bear the brunt of NFL effects. The effect on district judges only appears for judges born in the same state as the current state of residence, providing clean evidence of extraneous influences on judge decision-making as opposed to lawyer or applicant behavior.
Moving beyond OLS, we utilize models from machine learning to estimate the sentence length relative to the sentencing guideline. We find that while several appropriate features predict sentence length, such as details of the crime committed, other features seemingly unrelated, including daily temperature, sport game scores, and location of trial, are predictive as well. The predictive power of the unrelated events is derived from the permutation based variable importance score in random forests. We address recent criticism of the reliability of these scores with double residualization
Le non-renouvellement exprès du mandat à durée déterminée du gérant d’une société civile (Cass. com., 27 novembre 2024, n° 22-24.631)
No full textIl résulte de l'article 1846 du Code civil, dans sa rédaction applicable en Polynésie française, que lorsque le gérant d'une société civile a été nommé pour une durée déterminée, la survenance du terme de son mandat entraîne, à défaut de renouvellement exprès, la cessation de plein droit de ce mandat, sans que le gérant qui continue de diriger de fait la société, puisse se prévaloir d'une reconduction tacite
Competing digital monies
Full text linkWe compare three competing digital payment instruments: bank deposits, private stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). A simple theoretical model integrates the theory of two-sided markets and payment economics to assess the benefits of interoperability through a retail fast payment system organised by the central bank. We show an equivalence result between such a fast payment system and a retail CBDC. We find that both can improve financial integration and increase trade volume, but also tend to reduce the market shares of incumbent intermediaries
Bayesian Learning in Mean Field Games
No full textWe consider a mean-field game model in which the cost functions depend on a fixed parameter referred to as the “state,” which remains unknown to the players. Players acquire information about the state through private signals received during the course of the game. We derive a mean-field system that characterizes the equilibrium payoff of the game and demonstrate the existence of a solution under standard regularity assumptions. Furthermore, we establish the uniqueness of the solution when the cost function satisfies the monotonicity assumption proposed by Lasry and Lions at each state