Tipping the Scales of Justice: Perceptions of Unfair Treatment in the Courtroom

Collins, Todd A.; Dumas, Tao L.; Moyer, Laura P.

doi:10.1080/0098261x.2018.1483215

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Accordingly, female attorneys often must balance competing professional and gender norms. Thus, despite near parity in law school admissions and graduations (ABA 2018), female trial court attorneys often report discrimination from jurists and attorneys alike (Collins, Dumas, and Moyer 2017, 2018; Winkle and Wedeking 2003) and the Supreme Court Bar remains overwhelmingly male in composition (Szmer, Kaheny, and Sarver 2021). Under these conditions, when a female attorney appears at oral arguments, the justices implicitly note her sex (Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady 1999) and activate gender normative expectations of how women should act (Eagly and Carli 2007; Patton and Smith 2020).…”

Section: Oral Arguments As Conversationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Gleason

2024

Social Science Quarterly

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ObjectiveAt U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, female attorneys are more likely to be interrupted than their male counterparts under some conditions. This makes it difficult for women to effectively construct a narrative and substantively impact case law. While existing work conceptualizes gender as a binary, I draw on recent work stressing gender is performative to deesentialize gender and explore how attorneys’ compliance with gender norms and subtle expectations about men's and women's behavior in a host of contexts, predicts interruptions at oral arguments.MethodsVia quantitative textual analysis of all oral arguments from 2004 to 2019 where one attorney argues for the petitioner and one for the respondent, I examine the extent to which gender norm compliance predicts interruptions.ResultsI find both male and female attorneys are interrupted more frequently when their oral arguments are not gender normative. Thus, an argument that is successful for a male attorney is not necessarily successful for a female attorney, and vice versa.ConclusionMy results underscore female attorneys are not less successful as a matter of course; attorney success is driven by attorney compliance with gender norms. This work also raises a number of normative questions I encourage future scholars to explore.

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Section: Oral Arguments As Conversationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Gleason

2024

Social Science Quarterly

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“…White women, women of color, and-to a lesser extent-non-white men are more likely than white male attorneys to have experienced a situation where a client requested a new attorney (Nelson et al, 2019), and black judges are more likely to be asked to recuse themselves in cases involving race (Means & Unah, 2020). In the courtroom and in interactions with other attorneys, including their own co-workers, female attorneys report demeaning behavior, such as inappropriate comments about their appearance (Collins et al, 2017(Collins et al, , 2018. These experiences illustrate and reinforce perceptions that women and people of color do not belong in prestigious legal occupations, like that of attorney or judge.…”

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

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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).

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“…Data on attorney race is difficult to obtain, which had previously made it nearly impossible to examine racial and intersectional bias in judicial politics in this way. Collins, Dumas and Moyer (2018) utilize a novel survey to understand attorneys perceived treatment by courtroom work groups, including judges, and find that bias is reported at a significantly higher level by non-white male attorneys. Widner, Thurman and Buehring (NP) hand coded attorney race for the 2019 and 2020 term of the Court to examine how the COVID-19 oral argument rule changes influenced judicial behavior and find that the protocols reduced the overall number of interruptions.…”

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confidence: 99%

“Excuse me –” Race and Intersectionality of Interruptions at the U.S. Supreme Court

Lane,

Widner

2024

Preprint

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Racial and gender bias pervade American political institutions, and the Supreme Court is no exception. Women lawyers are interrupted more and allowed to speak for less time than their male colleagues. We expect that stereotypes will also lead to biased treatment of attorneys of color, and will have the greatest impact on women attorneys of color due to their intersectional identity. In doing so, we introduce a refined measure of interruptions that more precisely captures oral argument dynamics. Using a database of the race of members of the Supreme Court bar and transcripts of all oral arguments held from October Terms 2009 – 2018, we find that women attorneys of color receive harsher treatment by the justices during oral arguments than their peers. We also find that when the case involves racial issues, attorneys of color are interrupted less than their white counterparts.

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Tipping the Scales of Justice: Perceptions of Unfair Treatment in the Courtroom

Cited by 3 publications

References 54 publications

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

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

“Excuse me –” Race and Intersectionality of Interruptions at the U.S. Supreme Court

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