Less than 1% of U.S. Federal judges report political motivations for retirement and resignation. However using two centuries of data, I show that 13% of retirements and 36% of resignations follow political cycles. When the President comes from a different political party as judge's party of...

I find that judges assign 8% longer sentences to defendants whose first initials match their own. Name letter effects amplify when the first and second letter of the name match, when the entire name matches, when the name letter is rare, and appear for roughly all judges. The effects are larger...

Public enforcement of law relies on the use of public agents, such as judges, to follow the law. Are judges motivated only by strategic interests and ideology, as many models posit, rather than a duty to follow the law? We use the random assignment of U.S. Federal judges setting...