J-Law 13 — Publication of Judicial Philosophy & Reversal Rates

For every judge, the following must be published: their interpretive approach (Purposivism, Textualism, or Originalism), the number of their cases appealed, and their rate of reversal on appeal.

Attorneys buy this information today. Litigation analytics services sell judge profiles — ruling tendencies, reversal statistics, motion-grant rates — to law firms that can afford the subscription, and insiders trade the rest over lunch. The self-represented litigant walks into the same courtroom knowing nothing, arguing to a judicial philosophy they were never told exists, before a judge whose error rate is a guarded secret.

Restaurants post inspection grades. Surgeons' complication rates are increasingly public. Mutual funds must disclose their performance history to anyone they ask to trust them. Judges ask for the deepest trust of all and disclose nothing. Publishing each judge's interpretive approach and reversal record converts a purchased insider advantage into public information, lets every litigant understand the bench they face, and exposes the chronic outliers — the judges reversed again and again — whom the current system quietly protects by keeping the numbers buried.

The expected counterargument: reversal rates mislead, because judges draw different caseloads and reversal can reflect shifting law rather than error. Context is an argument for more publication rather than none. Caseload composition, the governing standards of review, and the reasons for each reversal can all be published alongside the raw rate, and the public is fully capable of reading numbers in context — it does so with every other professional statistic it consumes. The objection also proves too much: if reversal data misleads the public, it misleads the law firms currently buying it, yet the firms keep buying because the data is valuable. A statistic considered reliable enough to sell to insiders is reliable enough to give to everyone. Secrecy has never once made the public better informed, and no institution arguing for its own opacity has ever been doing so for the public's benefit.