Why Women Win: Gender and Success in State Supreme Court Elections

Nguyen, Tony

doi:10.1177/1532673x18788043

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thomsen and Sanders (2020) find similar results among state legislators. A recent study of judicial elections found that female lawyers who wish to become state supreme court justices are risk averse and underestimate their abilities; female prospective candidates wait until a seat is open before pursuing an office and delay running until they are certain they will have the “best” qualifications (Nguyen, 2019; but see Williams, 2008). This literature suggests that female judges may be inclined to underestimate their abilities and believe they must overprepare in achievement‐related tasks like writing majority opinions.…”

Section: Experiences In Legal Education and The Path To The Benchmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘All eyes are on you’: Gender, race, and opinion writing on the US Courts of Appeals

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Because stereotyping affects individual assessments of ability and because of socializing experiences in the law, we argue that women and judges of color, while well-credentialed, feel pressure to work harder than their white male peers to demonstrate their competence. Using an original dataset of published appellate court opinions from 2008-2016, we find that majority opinions authored by female and non-white judges go farther to explain and justify their rulings, when compared to opinions written by white male peers. In comparison to other judges, opinions by white men are about 6% shorter, with 11% fewer citations, and 17% fewer extensively discussed citations. Our findings suggest that norms about crafting judicial opinions are gendered and racialized in ways that create higher workloads for women and judges of color.Prestigious legal positions in the United States are filled, overwhelmingly, by white men. Women and people of color are underrepresented as tenured law school faculty and deans, as general counsel of Fortune 500 companies, and as partners in law firms (Kellerman & Rhode, 2017;Nelson et al., 2019). In state judiciaries, a 2019 report noted that white men constituted 56% of state supreme court seats, in spite of making up less than one third of the US population (Robbins & Bannon, 2019). The same report analyzed states with judicial elections and found that white male incumbents were more likely to run unopposed than white women, minority women, or minority men. As of January 2021, five of the nine sitting US Supreme Court justices were white men. Although Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all significantly increased the presence of women and individuals of color in the lower federal judiciary (Haire & Moyer, 2015), 1 one observer recently noted, "If you are ever unfortunate enough to wind up in federal court, chances are that your fate will be decided by a white man" (Millhiser, 2019).The experience of being one of a few "outsiders" in a high-profile, prestigious institution can be isolating and pressure-inducing for women and judges of color . As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed about her experiences as a woman in the legal profession, "when you are the only woman, all eyes are on you" (Associated Press, 1993). Biographers and historians have 1 Under President Trump, this trend has reversed, with the appointment of fewer non-white judges to the federal bench (FJC 2020). Trump did appoint slightly more women than George W. Bush but far fewer than recent Democratic presidents (Gramlich, 2021).

show abstract

Section: Experiences In Legal Education and The Path To The Benchmentioning

confidence: 99%