The Consequences of Specialization: Decision Making in U.S. Federal Specialized Courts.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Political scientists have devoted little attention to the role of specialized courts in the United States federal and state judicial systems. At the federal level, theories of judicial decision making and institutional structures widely accepted in discussions of the U.S. Supreme Court and other generalist courts (the federal courts of appeals and district courts) have seen little examination in the context of specialized courts. In particular, scholars are just beginning to untangle the relationship between judicial expertise and decision making, as well as to understand how specialized courts interact with the bureaucratic agencies they review and the litigants who appear before them. In this dissertation, I examine the consequences of specialization in the federal judiciary. The first chapter introduces the landscape of existing federal specialized courts. The second chapter investigates the patterns of recent appointments to specialized courts, focusing specifically on how the qualifications of specialized court judges compare to those of generalists. The third chapter considers the role of expertise in a specialized court, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and argues that expertise enhances the ability for judges to apply their ideologies to complex, technical cases. The fourth chapter shifts focus to the impact of litigant resources, specifically attorney expertise, in specialized courts. The fifth chapter evaluates the role of law in a specialized court by examining how changes in legal standards of review impact specialized court judges’ decisions. Finally, the sixth chapter concludes.