Simulating Justices: Career Trajectory and the High Court of Australia

Australian High Court Justices are powerful political elites. They are able to declare laws unconstitutional, reverse or reinforce controversial policy, and in some cases re-write laws by their own hand. Because of this power, there is a substantial literature about the selection of justices, and yet scant attention is paid to their pre-Court career experience which may inform the decisions they make on the highest court. This paper explores the phenomena of judicial appointment through the use of sequence analysis. Originally developed for DNA research, sequence analysis has attracted increased attention in the social sciences for the analysis of longitudinal data in which the order of states in a time series is of importance. High Court Justices are ideal candidates to subject to sequence analysis, because they are highly visible public figures whose pre-Court careers are heavily scrutinized, publicized and recorded as part of their appointment process. Consequently, the majority of their biographical and career data is easily accessible. Finally, because their numbers are limited, there are less heavy computational demands required to conduct the sequence analysis. We attempt to do two things: first, we assemble a longitudinal dataset of all Australian High Court Justice career paths from 1901-2016. Using this data we focuses on the order, and duration of pre-High Court careers (e.g. private practice lawyer, government lawyer, non-legal job, lower-level court judge etc.), to identify archetypal pre-High Court career paths. Second, we simulate data for 1000 sets of High Court Justices. Using this simulated data we manipulate both the order and median duration of each of the pre-Court career states in order to estimate the effect that these changes have on the probability of High Court appointment.