Friday, December 05, 2008

Theory: Judge Erdmann is the Justice Kennedy of CAAF

Is Judge Erdmann becoming the Justice Kennedy of CAAF? I am horrible at these WWBJD type of posts, but I briefly perused opinions for the last 2 terms (well, 1 and a 1/4 terms). J Erdmann has been in the majority in all cases during that time except 6. Two notable dissents for J Erdmann were Wuterich and Lopez de Victoria. I haven't done the math to see how many dissents all other judges had, but even J Baker, who is part of the most likely alliance on the court with CJ Effron, had 9 non-majority result opinions.

I also noticed that J Erdmann was all over the ideological map in CAAFlog's July 2008 Not so Entangling Alliances post. According to CAAFlog's rankings, J Erdmann was almost as likely to be paired with CJ Effron as J Ryan. His rankings for pairing with J Stucky and J Baker were similarly close, ranking 7 and 6, respectively. I'll keep an eye on this and see if I can prove my hypothesis, though I was hoping for a greater spread with the Baker dissents.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

nuts, silliest comparison ever.

Anonymous said...

poops, silliest anon posting ever.

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There is nothing wrong with a decisional comparison among judges. Its just data. Logical flaws could include drawing faulty conclusions from the differences. But there is nothing silly about the comparison whatsoever.

Anonymous said...

Your theory may be wholly debunked if Justice Kennedy votes against Judge Erdmann on Denedo.