a research overview.  

My research interests include judicial politics, quantitative methods, administrative law, civil procedure, and American political institutions. Many of my current projects focus on lower federal court judicial decision making.   My disseration, supported by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant, is entitled Placing Federal District Courts in the Judicial Hierarchy.  I am also interested in bringing unique and interesting methods and data to the study of other legal institutions and actors.

While in graduate school, I participated in a number of major data collection projects beyond my dissertation.  In the summer of 2005, under an NSF grant held by Professors Lee Epstein and Harold Spaeth, I assisted in the collection of the Blackmun Certiorari papers at the Library of Congress. From 2007-2009, I served as the project manager for the EEOC Litigation Analysis Project, an NSF funded project spearheaded by Professors Pauline Kim, Margo Schlanger, and Andrew D. Martin that examines EEOC litigation in the federal district courts.


data.

Federal District Court Judge Ideology Scores (details and data here)



publications.  

Ryan C. Black and Christina L. Boyd. 2012 "US Supreme Court Agenda Setting and the Role of Litigant Status." Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization. 28(1): forthcoming.

Whether the “haves” come out ahead of the “have nots” in the judicial process is a topic of great interest for scholars of the judiciary. Although studies of lower courts have found that litigant status generally matters, research at the US Supreme Court is not of one voice, with conflicting results across several studies. Bringing a novel perspective to this debate, we analyze litigant status at the Supreme Court’s agenda setting stage. Using archival data from the papers of Justice Blackmun, we find that litigant status influences the Court’s decision making, but that the nature of the effect can be mitigated by the interplay between a justice’s ideology and the presence of interest group support. If you're interested, see our recent discussion about the paper on SCOTUSblog.

Christina L. Boyd, Lee Epstein, and Andrew D. Martin. 2010 "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." American Journal of Political Science. 54(2): 389-411
                 
              Winner of the 2008 Midwest Political Science Association Pi Sigma Alpha Award
Discussed in April 2009 Newsweek article ("Women: Truly the Fairer Sex"); May 2009 Washington Post op-ed ("When Women Rule, It Makes a Difference"); June 2009 New York Times article ("Debate on Whether Female Judges Decide Differently Arises Anew"); June 2009 Washington Post article ("Court Watch: Wise Women, Impacting the Courts?"); July 2009 National Journal Magazine article ("Do Gender And Race Mean Greater Empathy?"); Interviewed about for "Who Should Be Next on the US Supreme Court?" on NPR affiliate program To The Point hosted by Warren Olney.
We enter the debate over the role of sex in judging by addressing the two primary theoretical and empirical questions it raises: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly---"individual effects"---and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently---"panel effects." While we attend to the dominant theoretical extant accounts of why we might expect to observe either or both effects, we do not use the predominant statistical tools to assess them. Instead, we deploy a more appropriate methodology---semi-parametric matching, which follows from a formal framework for causal inference.  Applying matching methods to thirteen areas of law, we observe consistent effects in only one---sex discrimination. For these disputes, the probability of a judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about 10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, when a woman serves on a panel with men, the men are significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant. These results are consistent with an informational account of gendered judging and are inconsistent with several others.

For more project information and data, please see here

Christina L. Boyd and David A. Hoffman. 2010. "Disputing Limited Liability"    Northwestern University Law Review Forthcoming. Vol. 104(3).

Using a newly collected set of data, we examine veil piercing lawsuits brought in the federal district courts over six years. We find that plaintiffs succeed quite often in veil piercing litigation, if success is defined as winning on motions that do not terminate a case. A variety of legal and extra-legal factors predict such interstitial veil piercing success.  Voluntary creditor causes of action promote veil piercing; LLCs are in very limited circumstances better insulated from veil piercing claims than corporations; undercapitalization is strongly associated with success while conclusory grounds like "facade" and "sham" are not; and defendants' legal sophistication is predictive of plaintiff failure.  Extra-legal factors play a more striking and counterintuitive role. Plaintiffs suing small companies are much more likely to win veil piercing motions and obtain case-level relief than those suing larger companies.  

Our findings call into question existing approaches to the disputation of limited liability and contribute to more general scholarship about selection effects and judicial behavior.  They do not provide any easy answers to the questions of what defendants can do to insulate themselves from veil piercing.  Our analysis suggests: very little, apart from being very big.

Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, and Christina L. Boyd. 2007. "On the Effective Communication of the Results of  Empirical Studies, Part II." Vanderbilt Law Review 60:101-146

This paper is Part II of a two paper series (with Part I authored by Epstein,  Martin, and Schneider) designed to encourage legal academics engaging in empirical research to effectively present the results of their labors.  Part II focuses on communicating data and presenting statistical results. See here for copies of the papers and more information on their contents.

Christina L. Boyd and James F. Spriggs. 2009. “An Examination of Strategic Anticipation of Appellate Court Preferences by Federal District Court Judges”  Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. 29: 37-80.  

Pauline Kim, Margo Schlanger, Christina L. Boyd, and Andrew D. Martin. 2009. “Studying District Court Decision Making” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. 29: 83-112.

Christina L. Boyd and Lee Epstein. May 3, 2009. “When Women Rule, It Makes a Difference” Washington Post.

    Also published in Chapel Hill Herald, May 3, 2009; The China Post, May 4, 2009; Dallas
    Morning News, May 4, 2009; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 5, 2009; Miami Herald, May 5,
    2009; Virginian-Pilot, May 5, 2009; May 10, 2009; San Mateo County Times, May 10, 2009;
    Contra Costa Times, May 10, 2009; Alameda Times-Star, May 10, 2009; Oakland Tribute,
    May 10, 2009. 

Lee Epstein, Christina L. Boyd and Andrew D. Martin. 2008. "The Court(s) and the Election" Miller-McCune Magazine. 

The Supreme Court is always a campaign focus. But the next president's most important effect on the legal system may involve the ideology, race and gender of his relatively   anonymous appointees to the federal appellate courts.

This article is available here.

dissertation.  

Viewed as the sum of its three essays, this dissertation project seeks to remedy this deficit and unearth an unprecedented degree of evidence on the role and place of federal district courts in the judicial hierarchy.  These essays are:

(1) Integrating Process, Policy, and Outcomes in Judicial Studies 

Utilizing an original database of cases terminated in 29 federal district courts from 2000 to
2004, I assess the impact that courts of appeals have on district court decision making after a
case is appealed to the circuit court and then returned to the district court on remand. I find
that appellate courts do impact district courts, both in terms of the parties that win and the
disposition methods that take place. Specifically, the specificity of appellate court directions
given to district courts are an important determinant of impact, as is the appellate court
decision to publish the opinion remanding the case to the district court. These findings
have vast implications, including for hierarchical control in the judiciary, appellate court
bargaining, and perceptions of judicial legitimacy. A draft of this essay is available here (.pdf).


(2) The Impact of Courts of Appeals on Substantive and Procedural Success in the Federal District Courts
 
Utilizing an original database of cases terminated in 29 federal district courts from 2000 to 2004, I assess the impact that courts of appeals have on district court decision making after a case is appealed to the circuit court and then returned to the district court on remand. I find that appellate courts do impact district courts, both in terms of the parties that win and the disposition methods that take place. In particular, the specificity of appellate court directions  given to district courts are an important determinant of impact, as is the appellate court decision to publish the opinion remanding the case to the district court. These findings have vast implications, including for hierarchical control in the judiciary, appellate court bargaining, and perceptions of judicial legitimacy.  A draft of this paper is available here (.pdf).

(3) Quantifying Appeals

Within the judicial system, litigants, through their power to decide whether to appeal,
hold the key to shaping the institutional agenda. As theory explains, the choice to mobilize
one’s case for appeal can be explained by strategic, political, and procedural reasons. After
detailing these theories, I turn to an empirical exploration of them in the judicial system.
Using a newly collected dataset of federal district court civil cases decided between 2000 and
2004, the results are rather revealing, indicating that strategy and procedural fairness are
both important considerations in the decision of a litigant to appeal. 

other ongoing projects.


She'll Settle It: Judges, Their Sex, and the Disposition of Cases in Federal District Courts

This article seeks to provide a better understanding of the influence that judges have on the method by which cases are terminated in federal district courts.  By focusing on four district courts and estimating my results with multinomial logistic models, I find that the sex of a judge has an effect on how cases are disposed of.  The findings reveal that female judges, regardless of the district that the serve in or the type of case that they are hearing, are more likely to dispose of cases by settlement than their male colleagues. These results provide a significant addition to the literature that argues that females behave differently than males while serving on the judiciary and should also provide insight into judicial decision making at the case management stage in trial courts.


Advisor Influence on Political Elites: Law Clerks and the U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda Setting Process (with Ryan C. Black) [under review]
For years, scholars have speculated that advisors and staffers have influence over the decision making of their political principals.  However, no study has found systematic empirical evidence of this influence.  We remedy this deficit by utilizing the private papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun to explore the role of law clerks in the Supreme Court's agenda setting process.  In doing so, we first extend the certiorari voting model to include the recommendation offered by the clerk responsible for drafting the pool memorandum in a certiorari petition.  Our results indicate that clerks have a statistically and substantively significant impact on justices' agenda-setting voting behavior.  We then model the circumstances under which justices will be more or less likely to following the recommendations of the clerks. We find that institutional, political, and case-specific factors determine the extent of clerk influence.

Litigating Toward Settlement (with David A. Hoffman)

Previous research assumes that the factors influencing settlement are exogenous to the parties: once the complaint is filed, the die is cast. We hypothesize, by contrast, that the parties are active participants in the process by which they come to understand their cases and agree to private resolutions. Using detailed federal district court data to analyze how the filing and resolution of motions influences the timing of compromise, we find that the mere filing of a motion speeds case settlement. As theory predicts, motions which are granted are more immediately important to the settlement rate than motions denied, plaintiff victories are more important than defendant victories, motions about unclear areas of law are more important than motions about settled law, and motions later in cases are more important that motions earlier in cases. Our results open up a new area of research into the pro-social effects of litigation and provide evidence that the parties play an active role in learning to settle: they can force information from each other (and the court) by filing motions at appropriate moments in the case.


S e a r c h

   


About Me

An assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo.

[Boyd photo]

l i n k s

Blackmun Cert Papers