Abstract
Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. Judicial analytics can assess extra-legal factors that influence decisions. Behavioral anomalies in judicial decision-making offer an intuitive understanding of feature relevance, which can then be used for debiasing the law. A conceptual distinction between inter-judge disparities in predictions and inter-judge disparities in prediction accuracy suggests another normatively relevant criterion with regards to fairness. Predictive analytics can also be used in the first step of causal inference, where the features employed in the first step are exogenous to the case. Machine learning thus offers an approach to assess bias in the law and evaluate theories about the potential consequences of legal change.
Highlights
Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law
Turning from “what affects judicial decisions” to the question of “what are the effects of judicial decisions”, this section builds on the findings documented in the previous two sections and on the literature documenting the effects of judge politics, race, and gender (Schanzenbach 2005; Bushway and Piehl 2001; Mustard 2001; Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000; Albonetti 1997; Klein et al 1978; Humphrey and Fogarty 1987; Thomson and Zingraff 1981; Abrams et al 2012; Boyd et al 2010; Shayo and Zussman 2011)
= Experimental TOTdirect ∗P(expdirect) + Spillovers TOTindirect ∗P(expindirect). These example analyses are just the core of a broader analytical and data pipeline that starts from District Court cases, using the random District judge assignment to identify the effect of the presence of an appeal
Summary
Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. This article describes a set of findings showing that the decisions are not pure and can reflect bias (conscious and unconscious) and extra-legal factors such as time of day. Since many think that highly accurate predictions relative to a large body of historic cases would provide a good indication that judges could be replaced, this article highlights the need to de-bias the predictions so the law could be applied without distortion by these extra-legal factors, which are enshrined in the earlier decisions—a single landmark case can overturn decades of decisions.
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