Decision Rules in a Judicial Hierarchy: Comment

Abstract

(1) The paper by Cameron and Kornhauser[2005] is the second in a line that attempts to explain the function of tiers of judicial decisionmakers. The goal is to relate the rules that courts use to the litigants’ decisions whether to appeal adverse verdicts or not. This is a challenging problem if the modeler makes the realistic assumptions that the litigants sometimes lack information about their adversary’s type, and that the courts also often will lack this information. (2) This is an important and original topic that is approached in a serious and systematic way. The current paper is, I think, an advance on the authors’ earlier work because its information assumptions are more plausible. And as the end of the paper reveals, there is more interesting work to do. (3) This Comment is in the spirit of helping the project along, so it may relate as much to future work as to the current paper. My remarks largely involve a request for further explanation. Given the novelty of the topic and my innocence of the law of Civil Procedure, there is a lot here that is not clear to me, and that may not be clear to other readers.