Doctoral Dissertation Research: Personality Traits of U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

A personality is a unique feature of individuals that defines and dictates everyday actions in their lives, including judges on the U.S Courts of Appeals. This project will develop individual personality profiles of these judges by mapping them onto the popular Big Five traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This project then will incorporate the influence of those personality traits on judicial decision making and behavior at the U.S. Courts of Appeals. This project will gather pre-confirmation writings and speeches for all available judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1947-2020, encompassing approximately 700 judges. Using cutting edge developments in textual analysis, estimates of the Big Five personality traits will be generated. With these estimates in hand, this project will examine how personality traits influence judicial behavior and, consequently, federal law. This project will generate personality trait estimates for federal court judges, as well as the underlying corpus of text documents used to generate them. Project data will be widely disseminated to the public. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.