Unaccountable justice? The decision making of magistrate judges in the federal district courts

Modern federal district courts delegate vast decision-making powers throughout criminal and civil cases to magistrate judges-judicial actors that, unlike other federal judges, serve without an Article III political appointment. Through the lens of principal-agency theory, this study seeks to rectify the relative paucity of systematic work on these actors by using original filing and motion-level district court data to examine magistrates' decision making empirically. Our results support our expectations that magistrates are often constrained by the preferences of the district judges in and the institutional characteristics of their district while issuing reports and recommendations and serving as assigned judges by the consent of the parties.