While the impact of an attorney's sex has been examined with respect to trial court processes (e.g., jury decision making), no one has previously studied its effects on appellate court decision making. In this article, we argue that the application of gender schemas by some justices results in a devaluing of the arguments made by women litigators. Our findings suggest that women orally arguing attorneys are less likely to receive a favorable vote by a justice than are the male counsel they oppose and that conservative justices are more likely than their liberal counterparts to vote against litigants represented by female counsel at oral argument. This suggests that the ideology of elites influences whether they apply gender schemas in a negative fashion. We also find that justices are more likely to side with female lawyers in women's issues cases, indicating that the justices' perceptions of female lawyer expertise are enhanced in those cases. These findings persist The authors would like to thank Marc Rosenblum, Kenneth Manning, and Brad Wright for the helpful comments on various versions of the manuscript, though any limitations in the article are purely the responsibility of the authors.

This article examines the impact of lawyer capability on the decisionmaking of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). Extending prior attorney capability studies of U.S. judicial decisionmaking, we test three lawyer variables: prior litigation experience, litigation team size, and Queen's Counsel designation. We find that the first two variables have a statistically significant and positive relationship with the SCC's decisions in non‐reference‐question cases from 1988 to 2000. Moreover, this relationship persists even after controlling for party capability, issue area, and judicial policy preferences.

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American and Canadian scholars have found significant evidence of gender bias in the legal system, including the legal profession~ABA, 2007; studying lawyer gender bias in the US have recently inquired as to whether gender bias against women lawyers has crept into the decisional processes of the US Supreme Court~USSCT!. Specifically, a study conducted by Szmer and colleagues~2010! indicates that women lawyers are not disadvantaged in finding success on case outcomes but does suggest that conservative justices are less likely to side with parties represented by women attorneys. On the other hand, the study also concluded that the justices are more likely to side with the position advocated by women lawyers in cases raising "women's issues"~Szmer et al., 2010: 27!. Acknowledgments: We wish to thank Frank Collucci and the anonymous reviewers for CJPS for their comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript and Donald Songer for providing much of the data employed in the study. We also thank Jacqueline Baldwin for providing a French translation of the abstract.

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