Via NCinDC @ Flickr.
In their report, “Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging,” researchers Christina L. Boyd, Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin summarize their study of federal court of appeals judges’ voting patterns. They found that, in sex discrimination cases, female judges are ten percent more likely to rule in favor of the party bringing the claim. The presence of a female judge causes male judges to vote differently, too. When they serve with female judges, male judges are nearly 15 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party alleging discrimination than when they sit with male judges only. This held true even after judges’ ideological leanings were accounted for.
At a Planned Parenthood conference in 2007, Obama explained his Senate votes against confirming Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts, saying, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.” At an appearance on Friday, Obama said he intends to find a nominee “who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook” but is also about “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”
It’s not that rich, able-bodied, straight, white men can’t have empathy for marginalized groups, but diversity of background and experience clearly makes a difference in the way judges understand the world and come to their decisions. Right now, the makeup of the Supreme Court does not reflect the makeup of American society. I don’t have a preference for any one of the aforementioned women, but I am pretty confident that President Obama will make a sound decision.
I was always taught in school that a major function of Affirmative Action was to provide a cultural intervention on the ruling class, whose ideology was unable otherwise to progress beyond a narrow racist, sexist worldview. You know, like an epistemological, not just sociological intervention. Even though it does get wearying being the entire civilizing force in the world.
JD, I so totally agree with epistemological thing. I’ve been feeling really bad for la Ginsburg on that score. That panty sniffing hearing Sarah covered awhile back must have been excruciating for her.
And I just feel it is beyond the point of being able to reason with them. It is like a cultural difference; they just need to absorb it and to feel smaller and to experience for one second of their lives the experience of not being the loudest, most dominant, safest, richest, smartest, most legal, powerful voice in the fucking room. It’s like, immersion therapy. I sort of want to bring the Catholic 5 (I think of them like horror story opposite day Jackson 5) to a retreat and do some rebirth therapy with them or something. I actually believe that Scalia could have a late life epiphany, I believe he has that capacity somewhere deep in his perverted, oily heart. I used to play with the idea of trying to be his token liberal clerk (he has one every year). But, my grades weren’t that good. And, I would shoot myself if I had to be a clerk. And, I’m TOTALLY OVER investing any energy in converting gross conservative men. But someone should do it. Perhaps the presence of a new Latina Supreme Court Justice will sufficiently shame them into behaving better. (P.S. Did fucking Scalia and Breyer snicker about bras and panties IN FRONT OF Ginsberg??? Can you even imagine the gall? Maybe these men are shameless.)
I’ve been awake for a long, long time. I apologize for my nonsensical tirades.
Look at you, J.D. Regent, seeing a sliver of goodness in the Supreme Court’s heart of darkness! I have yet to see it myself. I can’t imagine working for that man…
Obama’d better pick a woman. Seriously.
JD: I hadn’t heard it put just that way, but so right on about the epistemological thing. It’s the reason I forced myself to keep going into a filthy, homophobic, misogynistic environment (for “fun”! On weekends!) for months: maybe I could shame these sexists and homophones into toning it down. It never worked. My respect for RBG grew even deeper the day I resolved to stop going back there after only a few months and she’d been on SCOTUSA (dudelier and more stressful by far) for years.
And I promise to stop being such a cheerleader for Kathleen Sullivan sometime in this lifetime, but she would also be the Court’s first openly gay Justice also, yes? Another civilizing force, coming at an important time for marriage equality challenges.
Ugh. Also also. Please forgive me my redundancies, I’ve been up a long time, too.
I don’t have much to add, except that I was at the MPSA Panel when they presented this paper. The methodological issues are the ones that got critiqued the most. We can’t run this as an experiment. It is not possible to determine how the the all-male panel would have decided on a discrimination case, and then compare it to how they decide the same case when women are present on the bench. One of the fundamental causal questions is; do male and female judges decide differently? Or is it their ideologies that determine decision-making? So basically which has more wight at the judicial level – sex or ideology? Empirically, I don’t think this question can be answered satisfactorily. I am still learning their statistical method of matching to understand their theory.
I am supposed to review an article by a Prof. who is looking at the Canadian courts to determine this – according to him after there are a certain number of women on the bench, decision-making is supposed to converge. Last I heard, their results weren’t corresponding to the theory. It should be interesting to compare Canadian and U.S. courts in this regard.