Lawrence Baum – författare

Most Americans think that judges should be, and are, generalists who decide a wide array of cases. Nonetheless, we now have specialized courts in many key policy areas. Specializing the Courts provides the first comprehensive analysis of this growing trend toward specialization in the federal and state court systems. Lawrence Baum incisively explores the scope, causes, and consequences of judicial specialization in four areas that include most specialized courts: foreign policy and national security, criminal law, economic issues involving the government, and economic issues in the private sector. Baum examines the process by which court systems in the United States have become increasingly specialized and the motives that have led to the growth of specialization. He also considers the effects of judicial specialization on the work of the courts by demonstrating that under certain conditions, specialization can and does have fundamental effects on the policies that courts make. For this reason, the movement toward greater specialization constitutes a major change in the judiciary.

Once largely ignored, judicial elections in the states have become increasingly controversial over the past two decades. Legal organizations, prominent law professors, and a retired Supreme Court justice have advocated the elimination of elections as a means to choose judges. One of their primary concerns is interest group involvement in elections to state supreme courts, which they see as having negative effects on both the courts themselves and public perceptions of these judicial bodies.

In The Battle for the Court, Lawrence Baum, David Klein, and Matthew Streb present a systematic investigation into the effects of interest group involvement in the election of judges. Focusing on personal-injury law, the issue that has played the most substantial role in spurring interest group activity in judicial elections, the authors detail how interest groups mobilize in response to unfavorable rulings by state supreme courts, how their efforts influence the outcomes of supreme court elections, and how those outcomes in turn effectively reshape public policies. The authors employ several decades’ worth of new data on campaign activity, voter behavior, and judicial policy-making in one particularly colorful, important, and representative state—Ohio—to explore these connections among interest groups, elections, and judicial policy in a way that has not been possible until now.

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges'' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges'' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges'' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges'' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges'' social peers. Engagingly written, this book provides a deeper understanding of key issues concerning judicial behavior on which scholars disagree, identifies aspects of judicial behavior that diverge from the assumptions of existing models, and shows how those models can be strengthened.