Collaborative Research: Judicial Diversity and Appellate Decision Making

By the end of 2016, over one-third of the federal appeals court bench was made up of women and over one-fifth were racial minorities. These figures stand in stark contrast to forty years earlier when the same appellate courts counted just one woman and three minority judges on active service. This study uses social science theories and methods to examine how this historic demographic transformation of the federal bench affects deliberations, opinion writing, and organizational practices on the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals. These findings will offer new and important insights on the intermediate appellate courts that serve a vital role in the administration of justice in the federal court system.

Data are collected from published judicial opinions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, biographical materials, and publicly available transcribed oral arguments, to test competing perspectives from social science theories about the effects of diversity on judicial decision making. One set of theories focuses on the way in which differing perspectives of individuals linked to race and gender affect small group decision making. Another set of theories predicts that interactions during oral argument and subsequent citations to opinions will reflect on societal processes that generalize stereotypes about gender, race, status, and power. Finally, theories on gender and racial identity predict that women and minority judges will bring new approaches to oral argument, collaboration, and opinion drafting. To test these various expectations, this study leverages recent advances in linguistic software and automated methods of content analysis to produce a novel dataset of opinion content and extend an existing public resource, the Multi-User Database of U.S. Courts of Appeals Decisions.