Sentencing in the Shadow of Promotion: The Impacts of Circuit Court Nomination on Federal Judges

Judges seek to maximize their own utility, like everyone else. Their goals include job security and promotion. Federal judges lack the electoral incentives that often drive state judges, but they could audition for promotion. I test whether they audition for promotion in their criminal sentencing. Using criminal sentences imposed in the federal courts from 2006 to 2023, I find that federal judges who are eventually nominated to a higher court hand down longer sentences than their other “contender” peers, though this effect is moderated by the judicial district. This effect is a mixture of judicial behavior and a selection effect—judges are promoted for a variety of other reasons, many of which may be correlated with criminal sentencing. While there is no across‐the‐board evidence of judicial auditioning during vacancies, there is evidence of judicial auditioning for some judges under some presidents. This behavior, though, ends at nomination: an event‐study design finds that the announcement of a nomination has no substantive effect on the nominee's sentencing. These results show that, despite the different structure of the federal judiciary from state courts, strategic rationality on the part of judges may also shape federal criminal sentencing.