9311999 BARROW The primary objective of this project is construction of a definitive, multi-user data base on the personal, social, economic, career and political attributes of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges who served from 1891 (the inception of this level of court) through 1992. We know the presidents of different political parties generally have different domestic agendas, that Democratic legislators from the South often vote differently from their counterparts outside that region, and that mass political behavior is related to social and economic characteristics. We are less informed about the extent to which these factors influence the voting (judicial decision) tendencies of appellate judges. Indeed, development of integrated theories about why judges vote as they do has been impeded by the lack of a comprehensive and reliable data base. This type of information has been assembled for Supreme Court Justices, but this is the first project to extend the data collection to the far larger number of federal appellate judges. The project will assemble the requisite data on federal appellate judges and then make them available to the scholarly community in a user-friendly format. The constructed data base will include the following information for each judge: appointing president, predecessor (if there was one), religion, party affiliation, education, date and place of birth, state of residence, age at time of appointment, previous positions held (in temporal sequence), gender, race, ethnicity, A.B.A. rating (since these have been available), and the timing and reason for leaving the bench. A complementary data base on case characteristics and votes is being completed; both data sets will include a unique identification number for each judge, thereby permitting the merger of the two for appropriate research projects. The merged multi-user data base will allow the scholarly community to pursue important lines of research that heretofore were impossible. * **
