Judging Women

Abstract

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that female judges might be better than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Using a data set of all the state high court judges in 1998–2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co‐partisan disagreements. For many of our tests, we fail to find significant gender effects on judicial performance. Where we do find significant gender effects for our state high court judges, female judges perform better than male judges. An analysis of data from the U.S. Court of Appeals and the federal district courts produces roughly similar findings.

The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

“…We find no statistically significant effect of judge's gender 19 and age on the duration of judicial deliberation. These results resonate with the findings of a subset of the empirical literature that has likewise not found an effect of judge's gender (e.g., Gruhl et al 1981, Davis et al 1993, Choi et al 2011, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b or age (e.g., Christensen andSzmer 2012, Schneider 2005) on adjudicatory outcomes.…”

“…Furthermore, even after controlling for a range of case characteristics and judge fixed effects, cases where at least one party is a legal person tend to be deliberated on longer than cases where all involved parties are physical persons. These findings resonate with different subsets of the prior literature that has highlighted the importance of judge characteristics and extralegal factors for adjudicatory outcomes (see, e.g., Schneider 2005, Teitelbaum 2006, Choi et al 2011, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b, Danziger et al 2011, Ramseyer 2012, Schanzenbach 2015.…”

“…Evidence about the effect of a judge's gender on various adjudicatory outcomes is overall mixed, with some studies (see, e.g., Davis et al 1993, Peresie 2005, Boyd et al 2010 suggesting that judge's gender matters and others (see, e.g., Gruhl et al 1981, Choi et al 2011, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b) that it does not. We, therefore, do not articulate a hypothesis about the expected association between judge's gender and deliberation time and instead let the data speak for itself.…”

Courts in a Transition Economy: Case Disposition and the Quantity-Quality Tradeoff in Bulgaria

“…Adding a one to Appealed Cases before logging the variables allows us to retain courtyear observations with no appealed cases during the time period of our study and thus avoid sample selection bias. Logging the variables addresses the non-normal distribution of the data (see, e.g., Choi et al 2011b: Sec. IV and Table 1, Panel B).…”

Different voices : measuring female judges' influence on women's rights issues in the U.S. Courts of Appeal.

“…They measured the number of outside state majority opinions in several areas of law including rights. For this area, men were cited more often than women, but the difference was not statistically significant (Choi, Gulati, Holman, and Posner 2011).…”