From The Law and Politics Book Review

Vol. 9 No. 4 (April 1999) pp. 163-165.

 

THE GATEKEEPERS: FEDERAL DISTRICT COURTS IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS by Kevin L. Lyles. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. 328 pp. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 0-275-96082-X.

 

Reviewed by Robert A. Carp, Department of Political Science, University of Houston. Email:

 

 Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, Professor Lyles focuses his research on the selection and decision making of federal district judges. His work is a continuation of a trend in Pubic Law research that began several decades ago, a rejection of the "upper court myth syndrome" in favor of more emphasis on the workhorses of the U.S. judiciary – federal district judges. Lyles, eschews the once-common assumption that only the US. Supreme Court and its decisions were worthy of detailed analysis, and rather reaffirms the proposition that the trial courts are deserving of our attention for a variety of reasons: the vast majority of the district court’s quarter of a million decisions per year are never appealed and of those which are, the judge’s original decision is affirmed in a vast majority of the cases. And equally important, the author emphasizes that the trial judges are policy makers and not merely judicial bureaucrats who routinely enforce appellate court rules; likewise they are correctly viewed as instruments through which American presidents manifest their policy goals and predilections.

There are two primary questions which underlie Lyles’ text: First, he asks to what extent and with what success specific American Presidents have advanced various policy objectives through their trial judge appointments; and, second, he explores the degree to which judges’ views on specific policy issues correspond to their voting patterns on these same issues. He furthermore examines the extent to which judicial decision making is a function of the judge’s race and gender. An initial chapter sets forth the justification for studying U.S. trial judges and lays down the contextual and conceptual framework for the analysis. Chapter 2 outlines the history, functions, and day-to-day operations of the district courts, but more importantly, Lyles provides the first taste of the empirical data taken from the National District Court Judges Survey (NDJS) which provides a glimpse at how the judges themselves view their policymaking roles. Analysis of the data taken from the NDJS is one of the major contributions of this book throughout this and the succeeding chapters.

A third chapter focuses on the selection process of the district judges and on their various players in the appointments process, e.g., the President, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department, and so on. In this chapters he echoes themes made recently in greater detail by Sheldon Goldman in his 1997 text PICKING FEDERAL JUDGES: LOWER COURT SELECTION FROM ROOSEVENT THROUGH REAGAN. However, the novel contribution of this chapter is the data Lyles presents from the NDJS which outlines how the judges themselves view the selection process. For example, when asked how much did "politics" play a role in their confirmation process, 41.8 percent of the judges said "some" while 20.5 percent replied "a lot." The following three chapters makes use of Lyles’ creation of what he terms the "presidential policy objective profiles" (PPOPs). These profiles enabled the author to delineate presidential policy concerns in five major substantive areas: abortion rights, affirmative action, religious liberty, integration of the public schools, and voting rights. The analysis covers an impressive thirty-six year time frame – from 1960 to 1996.

Chapter 7 contains the major substantive analysis because it is here that Lyles correlates the overall presidential policy objective profiles developed in the previous chapters with the presidential cohort’s actual judicial decision making. Data on the judges’ decisional patterns are taken from U.S. LAW WEEK’s "Digests of Significant Opinions Not Yet Generally Reported," the methodology for which the author provides greater detail in Appendix B. Studying only "significant opinions" rather than all opinions might subject the author to possible criticism, but he does a fair job of justifying his methodological approach, and surely others have published in this realm without making any claim that their data set is a mirror of all trial judge decision making, e.g., POLITICS & JUDGMENT IN FEDERAL DISTRICT COURTS by C.K. Rowland and Robert A. Carp. In this chapter Lyles makes the important finding that "in all but two instances, when presidents have expressed an overt policy objective (i.e., high priority/high expectation), they have achieved strong measures of proportional success." The only exceptions were Nixon’s lack of success on the issues of abortion and school integration. Furthermore the author concludes that the trial judges do not appear to be totally constrained by supposedly strict appellate court guidelines but rather have felt relatively free to vote their policy propensities while on the bench.

An eighth chapter explores the effect of the judge’s race on their expectations of their key policymaking roles and functions. Here the author finds a troubling level of polarization between white jurists on one hand and Black and Latin judges on the other. For example, while just over 90 percent of white judge agreed that "Blacks have made considerable progress in securing civil rights," only 68 percent of the Latino jurists felt this was the case and less than half (47 percent) of Black judges believed that their progress had been "considerable." The next chapter explores this same phenomenon from the standpoint of gender, and there the findings are more mixed. When responding to queries about the general selection and appointment of judges, differences between males and females were modest. However, on other issues the variances were more dramatic. For instance, only 17 percent of the males believed that "a few big interests" run the government whereas 40 percent of the females felt that this was the case. In general Lyles findings about both race and gender are rather tentative which is appropriate given the somewhat limited data to which he had access.

The overall strengths of this book include the author’s use of the fresh data taken from the National District Court Judge Survey which he carefully collected while serving as a Post Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University. The data set is truly a major contribution in the Public Law realm. This is likewise true of the data on trial judge decision making gleaned from U.S. LAW WEEK’s digest of significant opinions. Quantitative data on district judges’ decisions are hard and tedious to come by, and the discipline will welcome this additional resource. Another strength of the book is Lyles’ highly competent and careful analysis. He has an accurate and keen understanding of the judicial selection process, and the conclusions he comes to based on his empirical findings seem fair and reasonable. He does not claim more for his findings than the data warrant.

The book’s pluses are tempered by one reality: its insights and conclusions serve to further validate the existing paradigm but not really to challenge it in any significant way. For example the extensive material on the nomination and appointment of federal district judges and the long discussions of presidential appointment criteria between 1960 and 1996, while well written, contain no new information and reiterate information that has been already well covered by other books and articles. Likewise Lyles’ substantive findings throughout the book serve to validate and embellish the conclusions reached by many other scholars during the past several decades. On reading any given chapter’s conclusions the reader is not likely to exclaim: "Wow! It this is true and validated by other research, just think of what this will mean for our understanding of judicial politics and policymaking." Rather a typical reaction to any particular chapter would be more like: "This is interesting and certainly supports the conclusion that Professor A made in her article on X or that Professor B made in his book on such and so." Again, the text serves to carefully embellish the existing paradigm – not to challenge it.

As a final observation I would note that the text is well written in terms of syntax and style, and the selected bibliography at the end will prove useful to scholars and students alike. The book warrants reading by all scholars in the public law realm, and by attorneys and members of the judiciary’s "attentive public" who are interested in the relationship between courts and public policy.


Copyright 1995