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.
Existing scholarship on the voting behavior of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges finds that their decisions are best understood as a function of law, policy preferences, and factors relating to the institutional context of the circuit court. What previous studies have failed to consider, however, is that the ability to predict circuit judge decisions can vary in substantively important ways and that judges, in different stages of their careers, may behave distinctively. This article develops a theoretical framework which conceptualizes career stage to account for variability in voting by circuit judges and tests hypotheses by modeling the error variance in a vote choice model. The findings indicate that judges are more predictable in their voting during their early and late career stages. Case characteristics and institutional features of the circuit also affect voting consistency.
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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