Representative Decision Making on the Federal Bench: Clinton's District Court Appointees

Women's authority in political decision-making groups

“…Though individual-level analysis of judges turns up few consistent gender effects (Ashenfelter, Eisenberg, & Schwab, 1995;Segal, 2000;Songer, Davis, & Haire, 1994), the story is much different when the gender composition of judicial panels is included in the analysis, and these effects appear to be robust to controls for ideology and other similar factors. For example, Massie, Johnson, and Gubala (2002) demonstrate that when judicial panels include at least one woman, the panel is more likely to take a pro-plaintiff position in criminal procedure and civil rights cases.…”

Rethinking Critical Mass in the Federal Appellate Courts

“…Ideological preferences of the judge and the panel were consistently significant predictors of pro-plaintiff votes, as was the ideological direction of the lower court's decision. In the civil rights models, minority judges were no more likely to cast pro-plaintiff votes than white judges were, as in previous research on the federal courts (Segal 2000;Walker and Barrow 1985). However, in sex discrimination cases, the coefficient for nonwhite judges was positive and weakly significant (at p ≤ .10), showing that these judges were somewhat more likely to support plaintiffs claiming sex discrimination.…”

“…A few circuits (e.g., the Third and the Ninth) remained consistently high in terms of the numbers of possible mixed-sex panels constituted, while the Tenth Circuit's numbers declined over this time period. Overall, however, most circuits experienced a boost in the proportion of possible mixed-sex panels in the mid-1990s, reflecting the success of President Clinton's strategy to diversify the bench (Segal 2000). In terms of judge ideology, female judges in both the civil rights and sex discrimination samples were, as a whole, more liberal than male judges.…”

Gender, Race, and Dissensus on State Supreme Courts*

“…Additionally, in Model 2, we included a three‐way multiplicative term (and concomitant two‐way multiplicative terms) including Justice Gender , Panel Gender (the number of additional women judges on the panel), and Women's Issue (coded 1 if the case raised a women's issue and 0 if it did not). In designating a case as raising a “women's issue,” we employ a similar operationalization to that found in Segal () . In addition, to test whether an African‐American justice is more/less likely to dissent in cases raising a minority issue, we also include the multiplicative term African‐American Justice × Minority Issue .…”