About

The Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS) project is a new measure of judicial ideology — and other traits — that will locate on a single scale nearly every Article III U.S. federal judge serving since 1990 (approximately 4,900 judges). Project development began in 2015, and the first phase, Circuit: Ideology, was released in summer 2024; this release estimates the ideology of essentially every U.S. Court of Appeals judge who’s served from 1990-2022: at least 450 judges.

The quantitative measure is derived from tens of thousands of qualitative evaluations — an ongoing, third-party initiative conducted over three decades — by a representative sample of thousands of legal experts, i.e., jurists, familiar with the judges’ approaches to judging. The full dataset comprises dynamic, interval-level, and multi-dimensional data….

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Research Using JuDJIS

Theory, Method, & Validation

• Kevin L. Cope, An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology (conditionally accepted, Political Analysis 2024) (theory, method, and validation) [SSRN]
• Kevin L. Cope, The Conceptual Challenge to Measuring Ideology, in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior (Epstein et al. eds.) (forthcoming 2024) (theory) [SSRN]
• Kevin L. Cope, Ideology in the Federal Judiciary (2024) (working paper)

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Discussion/Media

Data _{^{for Download}}

Please cite as: Kevin L. Cope, An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology (conditional accept, Political Analysis 2024)