Latino Judges on the Federal District Court: ¿Cómo Deciden?

• Author: Jason Casellas,Scott Hofer
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X19867052
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X19867052

American Politics Research

2020, Vol. 48(3) 343 –354

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X19867052

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Article

Introduction

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump

rallied his political base by promising to build a wall and

restrict immigration. He drew only mild criticism from

Republicans, except for comments he made about the presid-

ing judge in the class action lawsuit against his university.

Trump drew condemnation for denigrating the decisions of

Judge Gonzalo Curiel, by saying, in part,

Let me just tell you, I’ve had horrible rulings, I’ve been treated

very unfairly by this judge. Now, this judge is of Mexican

heritage. (Wolf, 2018)

President Trump’s comments about Judge Curiel were not

the only break from established norms in that his adminis-

tration has reversed a bipartisan trend of increasing diversity

on the federal judiciary; in fact, Trump’s nominations at this

point are the least racially and ethnically diverse since the

Ford administration.1 Trump’s tenure has seen a decrease of

Latinos in the judiciary.

Although it is impossible to empirically assess the impact

of Trump’s judicial appointments now, we provide among

the first large N empirical studies analyzing the different vot-

ing tendencies of Latino judges compared with non-Latinos

using data from 1985 to 2012. Due to the lack of available

data on Latino judges, scant empirical research has been con-

ducted on how Latino identity affects the judiciary (Haire &

Moyer, 2015; Harris & Sen, 2019; Morin, 2014). We empiri-

cally examine the extent to which the behavior of Latino

judges differs from other judges on the district courts using a

large data set of case outcomes.

We consider the following research questions: Do Latino

judges decide differently than their non-Latino counterparts?

If so, how? Are Latino judges more or less conservative, and

in what policy areas? These questions are timely given the

growth of the Latino population as well as perceptions that

such identities might have important ramifications on case

outcomes.

We find strong evidence that Latino judges decide more

conservatively than their co-partisans of other races. Trump’s

political goal of a more conservative judiciary may be under-

mined by his selection of primarily White2 Republican

judges; meanwhile, the lack of diversity has brought nega-

tive attention from the media (Corriher, 2018; Kapur &

Litvan, 2018). We begin by analyzing Latino representation

in the federal judiciary and then discuss different concepts of

judicial decision-making. We conclude by discussing the

importance of our findings considering the growing rele-

vance of the federal courts in American politics.

Background: Latinos on the Federal

District Court

The number of Latino3 federal judges has increased since

1961 when President Kennedy appointed Reynaldo Garza as

867052APRXXX10.1177/1532673X19867052American Politics Research.Hofer and Casellas

research-article2019

1St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, USA

2University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Scott Hofer, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen St. Brooklyn, New York

11201, USA.

Email: scottjhofer@gmail.com

Latino Judges on the Federal District

Court: ¿Cómo Deciden?

Scott Hofer1 and Jason Casellas2

Abstract

As the Latino population in the United States grows, it is increasingly important to understand how the unique experience of

Latino judges translates into legal decisions. This experience has included, until recently, a bipartisan prioritization to appoint

Latinos to the federal judiciary. For the first time, we analyze the judicial decision-making of Latino judges with enough

observations to provide robust results. We find that the differences in priorities between the two parties have typically

meant more conservative Latino judges on the bench. Using the Carp-Manning U.S. District Court Case Database, we

analyze the decisions of Latino judges to determine policy areas where they diverge from their non-Latino counterparts. We

find strong evidence that, under certain partisan, ideological, and policy-specific conditions, Latino judges decide differently

than non-Latino judges.

Keywords

race, ethnicity, judicial politics, Latino, representation