Female Justices Research Articles

Does the Judge Matter? Exploiting Random Assignment on a Court of Last Resort to Assess Judge and Case Selection Effects

We study 1,410 mandatory jurisdiction and 48 discretionary jurisdiction criminal law case outcomes in cases appealed to the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 to assess influences on case outcomes. A methodological innovation is accounting for factors—case specialization, seniority, and workload—that modify random case assignment. To the extent one accounts for nonrandom assignment, one can infer that case outcome differences are judge effects. In mandatory jurisdiction cases, individual justices cast 3,986 votes and differed by as much as 15 percent in the probability of casting a vote favoring defendants. Female justices were about 2 to 3 percent more likely than male justices to vote for defendants but this effect is sensitive to including one justice. Defendant gender was associated with outcome, with female defendants about 17 percent more likely than male defendants to receive a favorable vote on appeal. Our data's samples of mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases allow us to show that studies limited to discretionary jurisdiction case outcomes can distort perceptions of judges' preferences. Justices' ordinal rank in rate of voting for defendants or the state was uncorrelated across mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases. For example, the justice who sat on the most criminal cases was the fourth (of 16 justices) most favorable to the state in mandatory jurisdiction cases but the 12th most favorable in discretionary jurisdiction cases. This result casts doubt on some inferences based on studies of judges on discretionary jurisdiction courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, in which only discretionary case outcomes are observed.

Diversifying State Supreme Courts

Why do some states diversify their supreme courts sooner than others? Using original data on the first black and female state supreme court justices, I contend that political and institutional pressures influence when states diversify their high courts. The results suggest that selection systems, institutions affecting turnover, and the appointment of political minorities to the United States Supreme Court are associated with states seating their first black and female justices. The findings have implications for our understanding of the political and institutional circumstances that promote judicial diversity.

Judge Gender, Critical Mass, and Decision Making in the Appellate Courts of Canada

In this study, we explore gendered patterns of voting, and whether such patterns appear only after a critical mass of female justices is reached by analyzing the votes of justices in the Supreme Court of Canada. We employ a logistic regression model of the differences in the voting behavior of male versus female justices, using the universe of Supreme Court votes from 1982 through 2007. Our analysis supports the conclusion that women vote more liberally on civil rights, equality, and private economic cases, and more conservatively on criminal cases. However, we find no evidence that indicates a need for a critical mass of women justices for them to vote their sincere preferences.

Female Justices, Feminism and the Politics of Judicial Appointment: A Re-examination

In recent years, feminists in the United States have consistently advocated for the appointment of more female justices to the Supreme Court. Given the records of Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg on the Court and broader empirical findings below the Supreme Court level showing a relationship between a judge’s gender and her voting behavior, feminists have argued that, from a feminist perspective, the appointment of new female justices to the Court is likely to offer significant substantive, as well as symbolic, benefits. This Article challenges such feminist orthodoxy by showing that it is based on a mistaken view of existing empirical data on judicial behavior and its likely future predictive value. The article shows how, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, the current literature on judicial behavior in fact reveals little if any meaningful connection between a judge’s gender and her pro-feminist views, in a jurisprudential sense. By drawing on comparative experience in Canada, which between 2005 and 2008 had a female majority on its Supreme Court, the Article also shows how any female-feminist connection previously evident in the United States, particularly at a Supreme Court level, is unlikely to endure in the future, given changes in the kind and degree of discrimination experienced by female justices prior to appointment. Consequently, the Article also calls for a change in strategy on the part of feminists to focus more directly on the demonstrated jurisprudential commitments, rather than on the gender, of future judicial nominees.

A Content Analysis of Supreme Court of Canada Judgments: Preliminary Observations

Content Analysis – the conversion of words into numbers for the purpose of statistical analysis – is a valuable tool for the empirical analysis of the functioning of courts. The Supreme Court of Canada, due to its location in the centre of many of the continua which describe Anglo-American courts and its sustained gender balance, is a particularly inviting target for study. This article utilizes a database composed of all the opinions handed down by the Court between 1980 and 2004. Opinions have been tagged by the individual Justice who rendered them, the gender of the Justice who authored them, the type of opinion (majority, dissent, etc.) and the year in which they were handed down. As such, the database is designed to facilitate an overall analysis of the Court’s jurisprudence. This preliminary study discloses several interesting differences between the Court’s male and female Justices in work-load and their tendency to dissent or concur. An analysis of the Court’s judgments in comparison with other texts utilizing the Regressive Imagery Dictionary shows it to be heavily weighted towards logical, abstract and conceptual processes. Common phrases are catalogued as a preliminary step towards formulating custom dictionaries or coding manuals. The Court’s use of the word “Charter” over time has implications for Hart’s dichotomy of an expanding core of solid meaning versus a penumbra of uncertainty.

The Equal Rights Amendment: then and now

Far from a dead letter, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is currently pending in both houses of Congress. (1) When Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) reintroduced the ERA in the Senate on March 27, 2007, he particularly stressed the economic disparities faced by women and the importance of a national effort to address them. (2) Likewise, the principal cosponsor in the House of Representatives, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)--a proud relation, through marriage, of feminist Alice Paul who drafted the original ERA in 1923 (3)--stated that [w]omen are underrepresented in government and business, earn less than men, and are nearly twice as poor in old age. It is time to stop stalling and finish what we started 84 years ago. (4) The data cited by Representative Maloney are well known. Women make up a small fraction of government positions relative to their absolute numbers in the population. As of January 2008, there were sixteen women in the U.S. Senate, seventy women in the U.S. House of Representatives, and seventy-four women holding statewide elective executive offices. (5) These figures include, among others, eight governors, four attorneys general, eleven state treasurers, and one railroad commissioner. (6) Less than one-quarter of state legislators are women. (7) Women also lag behind men in corporate representation, as women held only 14.8% of all Fortune 500 board seats in 2007 and only 15.4% a decrease from 2006--of corporate officer positions. (8) Not surprisingly, the gender wage gap persists. According to the most recent analysis, the median weekly earnings ratio of women's to men's wages was 80.2 in 2007, and the ratio of women's to men's annual earnings was 76.9 in 2005. (9) The Institute for Women's Policy Research observed that the median weekly earnings ratio has hovered around 80.0 since 2003, the median annual earnings ratio has remained virtually unchanged from 2001, and [p]rogress in closing the gender wage gap has slowed considerably since 1990. (10) Finally, the institute also observed that men outearn older women almost two to one, and [o]lder women are almost twice as likely to receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) government assistance as older men. (11) The U.S. Supreme Court is yet another institution with considerable power where women are underrepresented. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's lone female voice on the Court is a further testament to the fact that equality efforts, which rely on goodwill and voluntary inclusion rather than legal mandates, have fallen short. (12) Ever a feminist strategist, Justice Ginsburg has used her recent opinions to show just how things might be different if a few more women shared in the power of the Court. (13) For example, in Gonzales v. Carhart, a constitutional challenge to the intact dilation and extraction method of performing late-term abortions, Justice Ginsburg decried Justice Kennedy's paternalism; Kennedy had suggested that because some women might come to regret decisions to terminate their pregnancies, the decision should be taken away from them entirely. (14) According to Justice Ginsburg, the Court's majority opinion reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution ... that have long since been discredited. (15) Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, she wrote, deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety. (16) Similarly, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., a case upholding a rigid application of a 180-day statute of limitations for filing a wage discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Title VII, Justice Ginsburg's dissent stressed the real world factors facing women workers who likely remain unaware as their wages slip further and further below their male colleagues'. (17) Regardless of how many women sit on the Court, an ERA could make a difference in the approach that both male and female justices take in cases where women suffer discriminatory treatment because of sex. …

Structuring Gender's Impact

The importance of judge gender as a factor in judicial votes continues to attract much scholarly attention. I contribute to the debate on the influence of judge gender by examining the voting behavior of male and female state supreme court justices in three areas of criminal justice. I find that female justices, controlling for institutional, political, and legal constraints, are more likely than are their male counterparts to rule for the criminal defendant and in a broader array of cases than commonly thought. I conclude that judge gender is a significant factor in the outcome of judicial decisions and that the number of women on the courts is a factor in judicial decision making.

How far does the gender gap extend?: Decision making on state Supreme Courts in Fourth Amendment Cases, 1980–2000

The importance of women on the bench and the influence of gender on judicial decision making has garnered much scholarly attention. We examine the voting behavior of male and female justices in 718 Fourth Amendment search and seizure votes cast on state Supreme Courts between 1980 and 2000. We find that women justices, controlling for institutional, political, and legal constraints, are more likely to rule in favor of the criminal defendant than their male brethren in cases decided after 1991 but not before. We also find women justices serving with female colleagues are more inclined to render liberal votes. We conclude the influence of gender may be evident in a wider variety of cases than those dealing with women's lives but that this influence is dependent upon the existence of a critical mass of women on the state court benches.

Women as the Court: The Israeli Experience

There was a time, not too long ago, when all judges in Western democracies were men. White males, to be exact. Then, in recent decades, the appointment of women and minorities - in this paper, I focus on women alone - to judgeships became an issue, then a distinct possibility, then a definite reality. It has now become so routine that it is perhaps a non-issue - it is almost politically incorrect to mention the candidates' gender. In the first part of the paper I provide a descriptive overview of the rising role of women in law and in the judiciary, in particular. In the second part of the paper I tackle more intriguing questions such as why is the appointment of non-white-male candidate an issue at all? What is wrong with all-male courts? And is there any palpable difference between the way female-judges act, once in office, and the way their male colleagues do? Typical answers, explained in this part suggest that women's growing numbers in the judiciary reflect professional appointments from a growing pool of qualified women candidates and that there are many reasons for the appointment of women judges - democratic, anti-discriminatory, societal etc. Finally, there is the argument that women have a 'voice of their own' raising the possibility that we may find divergent outcomes among all male and mixed gender or all women panels. This final idea brought about the current research, described in the paper's third and forth parts. I examine a unique feature of the Israeli Supreme Court: that it typically sits in three judge panels, rarely in expanded panels of 5 to 13. As there are currently five female Justices on the bench - almost half the total number of Justices on the bench - there are quite a few cases handled by all-female-panels of the Supreme Court. The Israeli Court is arguably the only national Supreme Court in the world to produce all-women-Justice jurisprudence. In this respect, this paper differs from other studies that focused on the influence of women in mixed gender panels, or on mixed and all-female-panels on lower courts. I located all the cases that came before an all-female-panel of the Israeli Supreme Court - over 200 in-all at present (May 17, 2005). In the final part of the paper I examine and evaluate the cases, seeking discernible differences between them and 'regular' all male or mixed gender panels. The results of this study tend to join other researches in the conclusion that, generally speaking, there is little difference between male and female justices, working in the professional and formal environment of their legal system. This paper was recently presented at the annual conference of the Law and Society Association in Las Vegas where I received many good comments to the paper in its current form. I would appreciate any view or critique to this paper.

Gender, judicial dissent, and issue salience: the voting behavior of state supreme court justices in sexual harassment cases, 1980–1998

The importance of women on the bench and the influence of gender on decision making has garnered much scholarly attention. Based in large part on the belief that women will act as “representatives” of their gender, much of the literature attempts to determine if women in fact do support the pro-women position in judicial cases. However, because the literature assumes women will act in a prescribed manner given the opportunity, the literature fails to question the willingness of women justices, given the political context of a case, to fulfill this responsibility. I propose that decision making by female justices on state supreme courts is dependent not only on the attitudinal predisposition women may have in support of the pro-women position in gender-sensitive judicial cases, but also upon the political and institutional context of any given case. Accordingly, I examine the voting behavior of state supreme court justices in sexual harassment cases decided between 1980 and 1998. I find that women justices do support the pro-women position in sexual harassment cases prior to 1992 and the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas sexual harassment Senate hearings. However, after 1992, there is no significant difference in the voting behavior of male and female justices suggesting the increased salience of the sexual harassment issue influenced judicial votes.

A "representative" Supreme Court?: the impact of race, religion, and gender on appointments

Foreword by David M. O'Brien Preface Introduction Religion: A Catholic Seat? Religion: A Jewish Seat? Race: A Black Seat? Gender: A Woman's Seat? Conclusion: Should the Supreme Court Be Representative? Appendix 1: Members of the United States Supreme Court, 1798--1991 Appendix 2: Catholic, Jewish, Black, and Female Justices of the United States Supreme Court Bibliography Index

Female justices

Journal Article Female justices Get access A county magistrate A county magistrate Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s4-VI, Issue 147, 22 October 1870, Page 343, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s4-VI.147.343-c Published: 22 October 1870