Does Judicial Philosophy Matter?
A leading theory in the study of judicial behavior is the attitudinal model. This theory maintains that a judge’s political ideology can be used to predict how a judge will decide certain cases, and other factors, such as the judge’s judicial philosophy, tend to be unimportant. Under this theory, the two judges with the same political ideology, but different judicial philosophies, should virtually always vote the same way in cases with predicted ideological outcomes. This manuscript tests the attitudinal model by examining opinions by two federal courts of appeals judges with very similar political ideologies, but different judicial philosophies: J. Michael Luttig and J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After defining the judges’ political ideologies and judicial philosophies, this study examines “political” cases in which one of these judges wrote the majority opinion and the other dissented. The result of the study is that when these judges ca
