Resource: The Comparative Outputs of Magistrate Judges

Do federal magistrate judges make different decisions and produce distinct judicial outputs from district judges? To provide initial empirical evidence on this question, this study utilizes federal district court data covering issue areas including employment discrimination, broader civil rights, intellectual-property rights, and personal-injury torts. The data indicate that magistrate judges are actively involved in civil cases, with as many as sixty-seven percent of cases having one or more magistrate judges serving in some role. These magistrate judges commonly preside over settlement conferences, decide discovery motions, issue reports and recommendations on dispositive motions, preside over status, management, and scheduling conferences, and serve as the assigned judge in the case by the consent of the parties. While there are numerous areas where there is no statistical difference in the outputs of magistrate judges and district judges, notable differences include grant rates of discovery motions, the likelihood of cases settling, appeal rates, the number of days to case resolution, the number of docket entries before case resolution, and the likelihood of opinion publication. The results may be due to differences in behavior between district judges and magistrate judges or, instead, may be driven by non-random opinion assignment practices.