Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts

Kastellec, Jonathan P.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1674052

Cited by 47 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Here, we argue that it is this sense of shared struggle with discrimination that accounts for their response to plaintiffs when evaluating their claims. This is similar to the account advanced to explain why African Americans, including judges, are more likely to support the claims of minorities in affirmative action cases and Voting Rights Act cases (Cox andMiles 2008, 2009;Kastellec 2013). Oral histories, public opinion scholarship and biographical accounts emphasize that more recent African Americans-including legislators and judges-continue to feel a strong sense of shared fate that fosters a perspective where a black judge can empathize with a plaintiff who has faced potentially similar circumstances (Haire and Moyer 2015).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…Oral histories, public opinion scholarship and biographical accounts emphasize that more recent African Americans-including legislators and judges-continue to feel a strong sense of shared fate that fosters a perspective where a black judge can empathize with a plaintiff who has faced potentially similar circumstances (Haire and Moyer 2015). Moreover, as with sex discrimination cases (Boyd et al 2010), African-American judges appear to be able to change the voting behavior of white colleagues on a panel so that they are more supportive of the position of the minority (Kastellec 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy

Moyer¹,

Haire²

2015

Law Soc Rev

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This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.You know, the young women today can't possibly . . . understand the pressures of being first . . . Nothing was good enough, and it took me an awful lot of years to realize how good many of the women really were in relationship to the men's talents. I mean, when I think of it, men that were hundreds of places below us in class were getting great jobs and there were no jobs for us.-Judge Ilana Rovner 1

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy

Moyer¹,

Haire²

2015

Law Soc Rev

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“…There are also studies of the representative Robert Schertzer 1050 mechanisms within individual institutions, such as the long-standing focus on the bureaucracy as a site for the representation of minority groups and a venue for them to affect policy and decision-making (Kingsley 1944;Krislov 1974;Turgeon & Gagnon 2013;Kennedy 2014). Similarly, there is a sub-set of political science literature that treats the judiciary as a key political institution, examining how minority representation on the bench influences judicial decision-making (Farhang & Wawro 2004;Kastellec 2013;Schertzer 2016).…”

Section: The Theoretical and Empirical Study Of Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping institutional mechanisms of ethno‐national representation: towards a better measurement approach

Schertzer

2018

Nations and Nationalism

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Measuring institutional mechanisms that facilitate ethno‐national representation is a difficult enterprise. Most studies examine the electoral system, while a set of other indices focus on designs and policies related to minority recognition. This article addresses a number of gaps in the existing literature by taking a wide view that considers a breadth of institutional designs that facilitate representation in a political system. The goal is to recalibrate our theoretical and empirical approach to measuring ethno‐national representation – to move beyond narrower assessments based solely on the electoral system, while also providing additional depth and breadth to existing indices and studies of related aspects of institutional design. To achieve this goal, the article (1) constructs an analytical framework that accounts for the institutional mechanisms that facilitate the direct and indirect representation of ethno‐national minorities across both macro‐level and micro‐level institutional designs in a state and (2) applies this framework to map institutional designs in twelve states to provide an indication of the usefulness of a new measurement tool (a representation index). The argument is that this framework and tool provide a corrective to the limitations of current approaches, advancing our ability to measure the institutional mechanisms of minority representation.

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“…Judges on the US courts of appeals engage in small-group decision making (Martinek 2010). Studies demonstrating the existence of panel effects in the courts of appeals (e.g., Kastellec 2013;Boyd, Epstein, and Martin 2010;Farhang and Wawro 2004) indicate as much, though these extant studies have not tended to frame their findings within the specific context of small-group theory. Of particular relevance to our purposes, scholarship pertaining to group decision making and performance indicates that the influence of member expertise on group decisions can be contingent upon several factors (Bonner, Baumann, and Dalal 2002).…”

Section: Small-group Decision Making and The Federal Appellate Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier, we raised the possibility of nonspecialists offering specialists a side payment for their specialization, conceiving of that side payment as the ceding of additional influence to specialists as a form of compensation for their careful attention to a particular area of law. Farhang and Wawro (2004), Boyd, Epstein, and Martin (2010), and Kastellec (2013) all investigate panel effects (concerning the inclusion of women or minorities on appellate panels) and speculate on the underlying causal mechanisms for the effects they observe. Farhang and Wawro's (2004) examination of employment discrimination cases suggests that there are two potential explanations: (1) suppressed dissent (driven by workload, coercive consensus, or some sort of organizational loyalty); or (2) modification of content (based either on a convincing argument from a colleague or on logrolling across cases).…”

Section: Small-group Decision Making and The Federal Appellate Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small‐Group Dynamics, Ideology, and Decision Making on the US Courts of Appeals

Miller

Curry

2016

Law & Policy

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There is some evidence that judges who specialize in particular legal areas vote in more ideologically consistent ways than do nonspecialists. Upon replicating those individual results across multiple legal areas in the US courts of appeals, we assess how this increasing reliance on ideology by specialists affects decision making by others on a three‐judge panel. We find that judges who serve with a specialist are especially likely to vote in a manner consistent with the ideological position of the specialist with whom they serve. These results suggest that specialization has the potential to facilitate panel effects across numerous legal policy areas.

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Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts

Cited by 47 publications

References 37 publications

Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy

Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy

Mapping institutional mechanisms of ethno‐national representation: towards a better measurement approach

Small‐Group Dynamics, Ideology, and Decision Making on the US Courts of Appeals

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