Sotomayor Ranks As One of Top Judges Based on Positive Citations

My colleague at Pepperdine Law School, Robert Anderson, has just posted on SSRN a draft article, Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the U.S. Court of Appeals. According to the abstract:

This article presents an empirical quality ranking of 383 federal appellate judges who served on the United States Court of Appeals between 1960 and 2008. Like existing judge evaluation studies, this article uses citations among judicial opinions to assess judicial quality. Unlike existing citation studies, which treat positive and negative citations alike, this article ranks judges according to the mix of positive and negative citations to the opinions, rather than the number of citations to those opinions. By distinguishing between positive and negative citations, this approach avoids ranking judges higher for citations even when the judges are being cited negatively. The additional information provided by this data produces strikingly different results from those found in the existing count-based studies of judicial performance. When the mix of positive and negative citations is taken into account, many of the most highly cited judges from the citation count studies are only average and some of the average judges in the citation count studies emerge as the most positively cited.

Applying this methodology to Sonia Sotomayor, Rob Anderson concludes that she is ranked 3rd out of 95 active judges in terms of positive citations:

By comparing positive and negative citations to judges who served over the same time period, we can arguably get a rough sense of relative judicial quality…. Judge Sotomayor ranks 3rd out of 95 active judges in outside-circuit citations, with 81.6 percent of her citations positive…. It appears that Judge Sotomayor’s work product is very highly respected by a wide swathe of the federal judiciary…. In every subset of the data, Judge Sotomayor is in the top 31 of the 383 ranked judges, and actually ranks first among all such judges in outside-circuit citations to panels on which she served…. These results reveal a great deal about Judge Sotomayor’s ability to produce persuasive consensus opinions that command respect throughout the federal appellate judiciary.