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, the authors 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 nature. 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, the
authors believe the flow of law clerks reflects a 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), the authors used these
nearly 20,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based
visualizations.
Using network analysis, these visualizations and
subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the
federal judiciary. For example, the authors found the distribution of
degrees is consistent with the power law distribution implying the social
structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors.
Drawing from the complex systems literature, these findings suggest federal
judicial actors self-organize at positions of criticality, possibly through
Yule's Law. In sum, if social structure matters then these results have
significant implications for doctrinal phase transition and the evolution of
the law.