From the simplest slip-and-fall to the most complicated antitrust case, and almost every civil and criminal action in between, the general judge must be master of it all. The United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations are constantly expanding as Congress and federal agencies enact more and more statutes and regulations. Because of these and other factors, judicial specialization has become increasingly common in the United States.6 The federal system includes specialized courts for claims against the federal government, as well as for tax, patent, and bankruptcy cases.7 Many federal administrative trial judges also specialize in particular areas of law, such as social security administration, securities regulation and veterans affairs.8 And many states also have their own specialized courts, which focus on topics such as water rights, environmental claims, land claims, claims involving state and local involve government legislation, and certain drug offences.9.
Specialist judges can, and often are, recruited from the ranks of lawyers who have practiced in that area, so they often come to the bench with relevant expertise.'0 Specialists can devote all their professional energy to the areas of law in which they specialize. And of course specialist judges see the same issues repeatedly in court; thus, an issue that may appear confusing to a judge who encounters it only once or twice will be familiar to the specialist judge who sees it repeatedly. In one previous study of bankruptcy judges, Ted Eisenberg reported evidence suggesting that bankruptcy judges, like general judges, are prone to the "self-serving."
Because we do not directly compare generalist judges to bankruptcy judges with the same materials, we are somewhat limited in the conclusions we can draw about the advantages or disadvantages of specialization. However, we also find evidence of a correlation between bankruptcy judges' political views and outcomes in some cases; that is, we find some evidence suggesting that Republican judges are more pro-creditor than Democratic judges.
M ETHODOLOGY
We did not ask judges to identify themselves by name, but we did ask them to identify their gender, number of years of experience on the court, and the political party with which they most closely identified. Judges had an average of eleven years of experience, ranging from less than one year to twenty-eight years. Finally, 76.6% of judges (82 of 107) self-identified as Democrats versus 23.4% (25 of 107) who self-identified as Republicans.3' Below, we report each case where we find significant demographic differences in all the judges.
Each questionnaire contained five hypothetical cases designed to test the influence of six psychological phenomena: anchoring, framing, omission bias, the effect of race of the debtor, the effect of a debtor's apology, and terror management/mortality salience.32 We have the judges read and respond to each of the questions independently. Because we did not ask the reviewers to identify themselves, the responses are anonymous and do not allow us to identify any particular reviewer. Nevertheless, we gave all reviewers the opportunity to limit the use of their responses to the conference presentation, thereby excluding their responses from discussion in other settings and from use in any publication.
32 The order in which we present the events in this paper is not the same as the order in which the judges received the materials. Judges viewed the hypothetical questions in the following order: anchoring, race, omission bias, framing, and apology/terror management.
R E SU LTS
Finally, we asked all the judges to set the loan interest rate: "Because the parties disagree about the appropriate annual interest rate, it is up to you to choose one. It is also worth noting that one of the judges in the anchor condition chose the original contract interest rate of 21%. This difference was marginally statistically significant.50 However, the judges' political party did not interact with the effect of the anchor.5'.
The number of years of experience of the judges was not significantly related to the interest rate. Beyond the characterization of the plans as involving gains or losses, the judges therefore had no reason to make other choices. An ordered logit analysis revealed that condition had no effect on judges' choices.82 Judges' gender, political affiliation, and years of experience did not affect their choices, nor did they interact significantly with condition.
Admittedly, these materials provided a somewhat indirect test of the influence of omission bias. Our problem did not require the judges to assess fault for the act or omission that displaced the debtor's savings. Here the omission or commission speaks not to that state of mind, but to the causes of the bankruptcy itself.
We have created a problem designed to assess the role that the debtor's race might play in the discretionary dismissal decisions that judges make. To reinforce the debtor's race, we used the name eight times in the statement. The justices' political affiliation had a significant impact on their decisions, as Democratic justices waived an average of $50,972 while Republican justices did so.
100 Judges' gender did not significantly interact with debtor's race. The race of the debtor played no role in the judges' evaluations in our study. After the presentation, some of the judges suggested that they did not even remember the debtor's name.
Although we do not doubt the judges' self-reports, the race of the debtor may have subconsciously influenced the judges. Although we found no evidence that the race of the debtor influenced the judges, we did find some demographic differences among the judges, as noted above.
Apologies and Terror Management
In terms of observed policy differences, it is not surprising that Republican justices were less lenient on education debt, given that the Republican Party is more likely than the Democratic Party to emphasize personal responsibility and reduce government aid. mortality) in judicial decision-making. To test the effects of both justification and coping with terrorism, we used a version of the problem we used earlier to test for omission bias. In this problem, as in that one, we described to the judges a debtor seeking to discharge his credit card debt under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code.
We asked the judges in all groups to say whether they would pay off the debt Jared incurred while on vacation in Cancun. An ordered logit analysis showed that judges who learned of the apology did not decide significantly differently than judges who did not. 125 Likewise, none of the demographic variables we measured (gender, political party, and years of experience) had a significant effect on judges' decisions, nor did any of these variables significantly affect the presence or absence of an apology.
An ordered logit analysis showed that judges did not make significantly different choices based on the nature of the debtor's employer.126 Gender, political party, and years of experience also did not significantly interact with the nature of the debtor's employer. Given the caseload of bankruptcy judges, it is clear that most determinations made for individual debtors do not involve detailed hearings, if they involve hearings at all. Second, unlike existing research on forgiveness, the debtor's forgiveness in this problem was not addressed to the injured party (ie, the creditor), but to the judge, who is in fact a third party beneficiary of the forgiveness.
Indeed, given the complete reluctance of the judges to pardon the debtor, it was perhaps an easy problem that left little room for emotional influence. The Republican judges set higher interest rates for the individual debtor in the Truck Driver problem; paid off a smaller fraction of the debt in the Consolidated Student Loan Problem; and were less sympathetic to the debtor in the Senior Citizen problem (although, as indicated in Table 3, this trend was not significant). If so, it is possible that greater specialization could lead to greater politicization of the judiciary.
Nevertheless, our study provides some evidence, albeit ambiguous and susceptible to multiple interpretations, on the relationship between specialization and the quality of judicial decision-making, as well as the potential politicization of the courts. At that time, he made a small down payment on the truck and financed the rest of the purchase with a loan from Ace Credit, Inc. McCall proposed a debt reduction plan under which his future earnings would be subject to court supervision for three years, and set aside some of his earnings to repay creditors.
If you choose plan B, there is a 1/3 chance that all unsecured debt will be paid and a 2/3 chance that none will be paid. If you choose plan B, there is a 1/3 chance that no unsecured debt will go unpaid and a 2/3 chance that all unsecured debt will go unpaid.
