Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In their view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional "legalist" theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

李•爱泼斯坦（Lee Epstein），美国圣路易斯华盛顿大学教授、政治学家。

威廉•M. 兰德斯（William M. Landes），美国芝加哥大学法学院教授、经济学家。

理查德•A.波斯纳（Richard A. Posner），美国联邦上诉法院法官、法学家。

黄韬，上海交通大学凯原法学院副教授、凯原青年学者、科斯法律经济学研究中心执行主任。先后毕业于复旦大学经济学院和北京大学法学院，出版有《公共政策法院：中国金融法制变迁的司法维度》《"金融抑制"与中国金融法治的逻辑》等著作。