Blacks on the Bench

Does Racial Balance in Workforce Representation Yield Equal Justice? Race Relations of Sentencing in Federal Court Organizations

“…Previous research on legal decision maker diversity and court outcomes yields mixed results. Much of the prior research focuses on differences between individual judges, and while some authors suggest that nonwhite judges are more lenient or even-handed in sentencing than their white counterparts (Gottschall 1983;Holmes, Hosch, et al 1993;Welch et al 1988;Scherer 2004), others conclude that nonwhite judges are largely indistinguishable from their white counterparts (Uhlman 1978;Schanzenbach 2005;Spohn 1990aSpohn , 1990bWalker & Barrow 1985). Further, some researchers suggest that black judges are particularly severe in sentencing decisions, especially in cases involving black defendants (Spohn 1990b;Steffensmeier & Britt 2001).…”

“…However, these expectations notwithstanding, there is presently limited and mixed evidence of the significance of increased ethnoracial group representation in the justice workforce to criminal justice outcomes (Ward 2006;Ifill 2000). The relative scarcity of race-related research and data on legal authorities, and theoretical and methodological limitations of existing studies, we argue, may contribute to the inconclusiveness of scholarship to date (Scherer 2004). In particular, we suspect that a common focus on individual-level differences obscures the relative distribution of racial group power or influence in specific contexts of social control, limiting understanding of the contextual significance of increased but still varying patterns of diversity among police, court, and other criminal justice decision makers.…”

Ideological Voting on Chile's Constitutional Tribunal: Dissent Coalitions in the Adjudication of Rights

“…The regressions and tests are conducted separately for seven subgroups of cases, including only the category dummy indicated. 6 In the judicial politics field, many scholars, including Scherer (2004), George and Epstein (1992), Carp and Rowland (1983), and Segal (1987), have shown that the effect of judges' preferences is dependent on case types and subject areas. The first two groups are all abstract cases (rulings on the constitutionality of proposed laws from the current government) and all concrete cases (rulings on constitutionality of an application of established laws).…”

Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues?

“…Other literature has found that being a female judge has an effect on cases involving sexual harassment, sex discrimination, or the sentences of criminal defendants (e.g., Baldez, Epstein, and Martin ; Davis, Haire, and Songer ; Massie, Johnson, and Gubala ; Peresie ; Segal and Spaeth ). A companion body of literature has found differences between judges of different races, for example, showing that African American judges are more likely to rule liberally on cases having a substantive racial dimension (see, e.g., Cox and Miles ; Gottschall ; Kastellec ; Scherer ). Taken together, this literature suggests that a robust theory of judicial politics must incorporate not only partisanship and strategic interactions, but also identity.…”