Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 48 Issue 1 Fall 2016 Article 6 2016 Changing Standards of Review Jeffrey C. Dobbins Follow this and additional works at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Jeffrey C. Dobbins, Changing Standards of Review, 48 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 205 (). Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol48/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by LAW eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Loyola University Chicago Law Journal by an authorized editor of LAW eCommons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 21_DOBBINS_DOCUMENT4 (205-251).DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 1/23/17 9:44 AM Changing Standards of Review Jeffrey C. Dobbins* Do standards of review matter? On the one hand, judges insist that they do, and appellate practitioners know that they ignore standards of review at their peril. On the other hand, it is not unusual to find judges and academics who concede that there is not much difference between the many standards of review, and that the articulation of the standard may not make much of a difference in reversal rates. To test the question, researchers would ideally take a set of cases, have a court decide them under one standard of review, and then, while avoiding any bias from deciding the same cases twice, have the same court decide the cases under a different standard. Though this is not a practical experiment, recent legal history offers examples in which legislative and judicial decisions have altered the standard of review for particular types of cases.