Surprise! Ideas Do Have Consequences!

A review of Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu (QJE, February 2026)

U.S. Supreme Court Building

Years ago a good friend told me something to the effect that those who claim all politics is local are incorrect. Instead he offered 'all politics is economics.' This was a bit before I took my first course in economics and before I read Galbraith, Mises, Sowell, Williams, or Hayek. Those with a penchant to categorize things might make valid inferences about my preferred economic bias based upon the relative frequency of the authors I've listed here and their well-known economic perspectives. So, I have come to believe my friend to have been absolutely correct. Now, when I find a bit of time, I enjoy going through the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where I invariably find something to ponder. The most recent issue, Volumen 131, No. 1, proved to be no less stimulating.

The authors, with justification I add, offer that the American judiciary often presents itself as a domain of doctrine, precedent, and professional craft. However as they proceed, Ash, Chen, and Naidu ask a more unsettling question: what happens when judges are deliberately exposed to a powerful intellectual framework, and that framework is not merely “legal reasoning,” but economics. Their answer, supported by unusually rich data and careful design, is that the exposure mattered in measurable ways, including the language judges used, the way they reviewed regulation, and even the severity of criminal sentencing. The article caught my attention because it hinted at institutional inculcation of ideas. The socio-political influences of academic organizations, whether disguised as economics, sociology, or countless other domains of academia are of particular interest, but access to relevant data is almost as daunting as it would be to analyze it. This article in a world renowned journal tweaked the unsatisfied desire to learn more about institutional influence from an analytical perspective.

What the authors studied

In the late 1970s and 1980s, a flagship vehicle for spreading “law and economics” to sitting federal judges was the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges: an intensive, roughly two-week program that by the early 1990s had trained nearly half of working federal judges. The authors link Manne attendance records (1976–1998) to (i) a comprehensive dataset of U.S. Circuit Court decisions (1970–2005) and (ii) criminal sentencing decisions in U.S. District Courts (1992–2011).

Their empirical strategy is a difference-in-differences/event-study approach that compares a judge’s own decisions before and after attendance, relative to judges who attend in other cohorts. A key institutional detail is that the program was frequently oversubscribed and admissions were first-come, first-served, which reduces (though does not eliminate) concerns that “who attends when” is tightly engineered by ideology.

The core findings, in plain language

The paper’s headline results are straightforward and consequential:

1. Judges begin to “speak economics” in their written opinions. The authors measure economics language using modern text methods (embedding similarity to a law-and-economics lexicon). The effect is large early on, roughly four-tenths of a standard deviation in the period when the program’s classes were most oversubscribed. Over the full sample, it is smaller and fades in the long run. Notably, they report "no comparable increase in statistical or quantitative language," suggesting the program influenced conceptual framing more than econometric technique.

2. In regulatory cases, trained judges are more likely to vote against certain federal agencies. The authors focus on labor and environmental regulators (including agencies the law-and-economics movement explicitly criticized). Their results are consistent with about a 15% increase in the probability of voting against these agencies after attendance. In their magnitude summary, they describe effects in the neighborhood of 16–17 percentage points, on the order of half a standard deviation, and relatively stable across specifications.

3. In criminal sentencing, trained district judges are more likely to impose prison. The paper finds an increase in the probability of “any prison sentence” of about 6.2 percentage points in the short run and 3.5 percentage points in the longer term, with little evidence of changes in sentence length (consistent with limited discretion under strict guidelines in their focal period).

Taken together, these findings support the authors’ central claim: exposure to a coherent policy framework can shift real, high-stakes judicial decisions, not merely rhetoric or academic fashion.

Why this matters beyond “law and economics”

I read this paper less as a referendum on economics, and more as a case study in how ideas propagate through institutions that are supposed to be insulated from ideology.

Judges are not legislators, yet their decisions function as policy. By documenting that a structured educational intervention predicts later decisions, the paper adds empirical weight to an old concern: institutional legitimacy depends not only on rules and selection mechanisms, but also on the intellectual diets of decision-makers.

The authors make this point quantitative by computing a “persuasion rate” (roughly, the share of decisions shifted among those exposed), and obtain a figure around 8% under their stated assumptions. That is not trivial for a branch of government where small margins can determine the direction of regulatory enforcement and the lived consequences of criminal punishment.

Strengths worth highlighting

Several features make this study especially persuasive:

• Scale and granularity. “Universe of published opinions” plus an enormous sentencing dataset is not window dressing; it materially improves precision and allows the authors to ask more specific questions than most judicial-behavior studies.

• A plausible mechanism. They do not stop at outcomes; they show intermediate movement in language, which helps connect training to later decision patterns.

• Institutional plausibility of identification. First-come, first-served admissions, frequent oversubscription, and broad participation across appointing parties all help the case that timing is not purely strategic.

Where a careful reader should stay cautious

The authors themselves are appropriately restrained about causal certainty. Two caution points deserve emphasis in any responsible reading:

1. Timing could still be endogenous. Even with oversubscription, judges choose whether and when to apply, and the paper concedes that endogenous timing cannot be fully ruled out.

2. Sentencing trends are not bulletproof. For district-court sentencing, they report robustness checks but also note that certain tests cannot exclude nonlinear pre-trends.

Neither issue negates the findings, but both matter when translating empirical estimates into institutional prescriptions.

A civic question the paper implicitly raises

If ideas can systematically shift judicial outcomes, then debates about “judicial independence” should not be confined to appointment politics and ethics rules. They should also include:

• Who funds and designs educational programs for judges?

• What intellectual traditions are presented as “neutral tools” rather than normative frameworks?

• How should courts, bar associations, and the public think about continuing education when it predictably changes jurisprudential direction?

On my reading, the paper’s contribution is precisely that it moves these questions from insinuation closer to meaningful measurement. The implications to the broader academic world of colleges and universities can only be inferenced, but the inference aligns with recent history.

References (Chicago style)

Ash, Elliott, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu. “Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 141, no. 1 (February 2026): 845–887. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf042