Graduation Semester and Year

2016

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Department

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

First Advisor

M. Lewis Wasserman

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of: (1) judges’ political ideology as measured by party-of-the- appointing president and DW-nominate scores; and (2) legal precedent as measured by voting which occurred before or after the 1991 amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on judges’ liberal and conservative voting between 1964 and 2015 at the United States Court of Appeals in Title VII national origin decisions impacting K-16 education, using binary logistic regression as its main statistical tool. The principal findings for this group of K-16 decisions are: (1) ideology, as determined by party-of -appointing president, is an effective predictor of judges’ voting in K-16 Title VII national origin discrimination cases decided at the U.S. Courts of Appeals when all other variables are held constant … the odds of a Democrat-appointed U.S. Court of Appeals judge voting in favor of the plaintiff are significantly greater than the odds of a Republican-appointed U.S. Court of Appeals judge voting in favor of the plaintiff in K-16 Title VII national origin cases; (2) ideology, as determined by judges’ DW Nominate Score, is an effective predictor of judges’ voting in K-16 national origin cases at the U.S. Courts of Appeals when all other variables are held constant … the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a DW Nominate score below 0 (liberal) voting in favor of the plaintiff are significantly greater than the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a DW Nominate score above 0 (conservative) voting for the plaintiff in K-16 Title VII national origin cases; (3) whether a decision in a Title VII K-16 national origin discrimination case occurred before or after the 1991 amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an effective and powerful predictor of judges’ liberal or conservative voting at the U.S. Courts of Appeals, irrespective whether this variable is set-up in a model using party of the appointing president or DW nominate scores as an ideological predictor, along with the1991 amendments predictor …the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge prior to the 1991 amendments voting in favor of the plaintiff are significantly greater than the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge voting in that direction after the 1991 amendments in K-16 Title VII national origin cases. Further, the data suggested that coding votes to “remand for further proceedings” as “liberal” rather than “conservative” had more merit than deleting this information from the data base even though they did not represent ultimate “wins” for the plaintiff. This is primarily because: (1) remands resulted in plaintiffs achieving their goal at the appellate level by reversing the trial court’s grant of summary judgment or motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim for the defendant and (2) represented a distinct possibility of going to trial in the lower court or obtaining a favorable settlement on issuance of the remand order. These results were discussed in terms of attitudinal theory and legal theory as factors influencing judicial decision making.

Keywords

Ideology, Employment discrimination, National origin, Title VII, K-16 Education

Disciplines

Education | Educational Leadership

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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