The Election Law Journal, volume 7, number 4 (December 2008) has an article, “Judicial Decision-Making in Nader’s Ballot Access Litigation” by Kyle C. Kopko. The article is 24 pages long. It concludes, in part, “Although much of the judicial politics literature indicates that judges behave in a partisan manner when deciding cases that involve a partisan interest, this did not occur in the context of Ralph Nader’s 2004 ballot access litigation…Even those judges who donated money to the Democratic or Republican Parties, the very individuals who should be the most partisan of all the judges included in the dataset, were not predisposed to rule in a way that favored their own political party.”
In other words, even though Ralph Nader was perceived in 2004 to injure Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Democratic judges were just as likely to rule in favor of Nader as Republican judges. The article studies all the state court decisions on whether Nader should have been on the 2004 ballot.
The article, of course, does not deal with the issue of whether Nader actually injured John Kerry’s campaign. An analysis in the January 1, 2005 (printed) Ballot Access News suggests that Nader did not, in fact, injure Kerry.