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Since the earliest days of strategic management research, scholars have sought to measure and model the effects of top managers on organizational performance. A watershed moment in this effort came with the 1984 introduction of Hambrick and Mason’s upper echelon view and their contention that firms are a reflection of their top management teams (TMT). An explosion of research followed and hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscripts have since been published on the subject. While a number of excellent reviews of this extensive literature exist, a relative few have asked questions about the overall state and future of the field. We undertook this assessment in an effort to answer some key questions. Are we still making progress on the big questions that gave rise to the upper echelon view, or have we reached a point of diminishing returns with this stream of research? If we are at an inflection point, what are the issues that should drive future inquiry about top management teams?

Once the sole province of U.S. scholars—and mostly political scientists at that—researchers throughout the world, drawing on history, economics, law, and psychology, are analyzing judicial behavior: why judges make the choices they do and what effect those choices have on society. How the field moved from a modest, niche project of political scientists working in the mid-20th century to the powerhouse it has become makes for an interesting story, marked by several key developments along the way. One is certainly the influx of scholars and theories from other disciplines that have supplemented and challenged existing knowledge. Other developments include the growing interest in judging from a comparative perspective; the massive improvements in data acquisition through technological advancements; and, perhaps most importantly, the sheer number of topics that now fall under the rubric of “judicial behavior.” Although the field has advanced markedly, much work remains. Many of the canonical theories of judicial behavior rest on the assumption that judges are rational, goal-oriented, actors. But decades’ worth of studies in social psychology, including experiments on judges, raise serious questions about the plausibility of this assumption. Should observational results converge with the experimental evidence, scholars must grapple with how to integrate insights from social psychology into the analysis of judicial behavior. On the empirical side, however notable the improvements in data infrastructure, most products ignore obvious objects of interest: the actual opinions produced by judges. Developing tools carefully calibrated to account for the unique ways judges develop and frame their work products presents yet another challenge. But it is one worth pursuing if only because of its potential to bring scholars closer to the goal of developing a fuller, more realistic conception of judicial behavior.