Drawing on the political theory of judicial decision making, our paper proposes a new and parsimonious ex ante litigation risk measure: federal judge ideology. We find that judge ideology complements existing measures of litigation risk based on industry membership and firm characteristics....

Using 321 circuit court rulings, we construct a measure that captures the within-country variation in courts’ attitudes toward securities law violations. Case-level analyses confirm that district courts heed home-circuit precedents and are more likely to dismiss pending cases when their home...

Drawing on the political theory of judicial decision making, our paper proposes a new and parsimonious ex ante litigation risk measure: federal judge ideology. We find that judge ideology complements existing measures of litigation risk based on industry membership and firm characteristics....