Replication data for: On Tournaments for Appointing Great Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court

In \"An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Performance\" (S. Cal. L. Rev. (2004)), Professors Steven Choi and Mitu Gulati are ambitious: They seek to quantify great legal minds. This interesting endeavor has both descriptive and normative components: Choi and Gulati hope not only to offer objective measures of what makes a judge great but also to impact the choices that presidents and senators make when appointing individuals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their procedures---which entail running the names of judges through various judicial tournaments---lead the authors to advocate a handful of well-known federal appellate judges for nomination to the high court. Although Professors Choi and Gulati have unequivocally started a useful dialogue, we argue that their approach is so fraught with faulty assumptions and imperfect measures that to replace the current nomination procedures with the authors' tournament could lead to a series of harms that, in our view, may very well be serious than those we face under the existing system. In this article, we describe the drawbacks as we see them, and note that while the authors could readily fix so me of the defects, others are inherent to the tournament and thus could not be remedied without rejecting the approach altogether.在《司法绩效实证排名》（S. Cal. L. Rev.，2004）一文中，史蒂文·乔伊（Steven Choi）与米图·古拉蒂（Mitu Gulati）两位教授开展了一项颇具雄心的研究：他们试图量化卓越法官的评判标准。这项研究兼具描述性与规范性双重维度：乔伊与古拉蒂不仅希望为“何为卓越法官”提供客观衡量标准，还期望借此影响总统与参议员在任命美国最高法院（U.S. Supreme Court）大法官时的决策。他们的研究流程——即通过各类司法评比赛事对法官名单进行考核筛选——促使两位教授倡议提名数位知名联邦上诉法院法官（federal appellate judges）出任最高法院大法官。尽管乔伊与古拉蒂两位教授无疑开启了一场富有建设性的学术对话，但我们认为，其研究方法充斥着诸多错误假设与不完善的衡量手段，若以他们提出的评比赛事模式取代现行的大法官任命流程，或将引发一系列弊端。在我们看来，这些弊端可能远比现行制度下的问题更为严重。本文中，我们将阐述我们所识别出的上述研究的缺陷，并指出：尽管两位作者可轻松修正其中部分瑕疵，但另有一些缺陷是此类司法评比赛事模式本身固有的，因此唯有彻底摒弃该研究方法，方能消除此类缺陷。