Trading Diversity? Judicial Diversity and Case Outcomes in Federal Courts

Abstract

Does racial and gender diversity on the federal judicial bench affect legal outcomes? Prior studies do not provide a clear answer, in part because they focus on how judges from different backgrounds---after controlling for other judicial characteristics---decide cases differently. In this article, we ask a simpler, but vital, question: do presidents' more diverse appointees, taken as they are, resolve cases differently than those presidents' other appointees? Using an original dataset of around 100,000 civil rights cases filed in 12 federal district courts, we find that the assignment of a case to a judge who is non-White or a woman has no statistically significant effect on case outcomes among Democratic appointees but causes more pro-defendant outcomes among Republican appointees. Our results are consistent with a theory of bargaining over judicial appointments in which Republican presidents take advantage of Democrats' concern over diversity on the bench to appoint more conservative judges.

Guilt and Guilty Pleas

“…Our paper builds on, and expands, existing work across a range of related substantive areas. First, our results are relevant to the large scholarship on crime and criminal behavior which argues that criminals are likely to be more risk-acceptant than the general population, and points out the important implications of these risk preferences for policing and sentencing strategies (e.g., Becker, 1968;Ehrlich, 1973;Block and Lind, 1975;Grogger, 1991;Block and Gerety, 1995;Engel, Nagin et al, 2015;Mata et al, 2018; 2 For a related argument in the criminal justice literature see Copus, Hübert and Pellaton (2022), who show that inferences about whether female and minority judges decide cases differently are complicated by the fact that the kids of women and minorities appointed to the bench are different in other ways. Polinsky and Shavell, 1999).…”