NIU political science Professor Lettie Wenner said she believes the judicial branch of the U.S. government is as much influenced by politics as the legislative and executive branches.

A specialist on courts and environmental policy issues, Wenner has examined more than 4,000 federal court decisions around the country and the resulting environmental regulations. She said she found two variables that influence judicial decisions.

“Political loyalty and regional loyalty both seem to play a role in what federal courts decide,” said Wenner, who recently received a National Science Foundation grant to help code and analyze those cases.

“What I hope to do is examine the two often conflicting influences and see to what extent one overrides the other,” she said.

Noting that the Reagan administration named nearly 50 percent of the current federal judges, Wenner said one of her tasks will be “to look at those new individuals and see if they’re treating the environment any differently from the way other judges are.

“Allegedly, since our laws are national, and all the federal judges are presumably administering the same laws, decisions ought not to vary,” she said.

Because there seems to be considerable variations from one region to another in what federal courts decide, another task for Wenner is to sort out when regional influences outweigh Political loyalty.

“Why does a Carter appointee in the deep South make a pro-business or development decision while a Reagan appointee in the East makes a pro-environmental decision?

“If laws were completely objective, we wouldn’t have such gross variations among federal judges, who are interpreting the same laws,” she said.

Wenner is the author of many books on environmental policy and the judicial process, including “Energy and Environmental Interest Groups” and “Commercial Landfilling of Hazardous Wastes in Illinois.”