Hustle & Flow: A Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary

This paper written by CLS Blog Co-Founder Daniel Katz and Derek Stafford from the University of Michigan Department of Political Science representes an initial foray into Computational Legal Studies by the graduate students here at the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.  The full paper contains a number of interesting visualizations where we draw various federal judges together on the basis of their shared law clerks (1995-2004).  The screen print above is a zoom very center of the center of the network.  Yellow Nodes represent Supreme Court Justices, Green Nodes represent Circuit Court Justices, Blue Nodes represent Circuit Court Justices.  Here is a wide shot of the broader network visualized using the Kamada-Kawai visualization algorithm:    

Here is the abstract:      Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary. Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the “natural” Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.   Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of “degrees” is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions.