Working Papers

Is Justice Blind? Race and Appellate Review in U.S. Courts (Under Review)

In this paper, I find that opinions authored by black federal lower-court judges are consistently overturned more often than cases authored by white judges. I estimate this effect by leveraging the fact that incoming cases to the U.S. courts are randomly assigned, which ensures that black and white judges hear similar sorts of cases. The effect is robust and persists after taking into account measures of judicial qualifications (including quality ratings assigned by the American Bar Association), previous professional and judicial experience, and partisanship. This study is the first to explore how higher-court judges evaluate opinions written by judges of color, and it has clear implications: despite attempts to make judiciary more reflective of the general population, racial disparities within the legal system continue to persist.

Quantifying Discrimination: The Role of Race and Gender in the Awarding of Subprime Loans (Under Review)

The recent subprime mortgage crisis has brought to the forefront the possibility of discriminatory lending.  Many -- including groups like the NAACP -- claim that women and minorities were disproportionately awarded subprime rates on their home purchase loans.  Using the over 10 million observations collected by the federal government in 2006 through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, this paper explores these claims causally.  In so doing, the paper explores two possible theories of discrimination: (1) that any discriminatory lending patterns are picking up the fact that minority borrowers went to different lenders, perhaps as a result of predatory lending, and (2) the possibility that individual lenders discriminated against identically situated borrowers.  The results presented here provide limited evidence for the idea that borrowers of different races went to different lenders, but only in certain regions of the country and only for certain minority groups. Many of these results are, however, sensitive to missing confounders, which in turn suggest that more data gathering is in order before definitive assertions can be made by legal and policy actors.

  • Working draft  
  • Slides presented at 2010 Riker Seminar at the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)

Like Daughter, like Judge: How Having Daughters Affects Judges’ Voting on Women’s Issues (with Adam Glynn)

Social scientists have long maintained that women judges might behave differently than their male colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al. 2010). This is particularly true when it comes to highly charged social issues such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and the status of gender as a suspect classification under federal law. Less studied has been the role that a judge's family might have on judicial decision making. For example, we may think that a male judge with daughters might have different views of sex discrimination and harassment than a male judge without daughters. This paper explores this question by leveraging the natural experiment of a child's gender -- conditional on having a child, the sex of the child is randomly assigned (Washington 2008). Looking at data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals, we find that having daughters is as predictive of how a judge will vote on gender issues as partisanship. We further find that, conditional on the number of children, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more liberal fashion on gender issues than judges without daughters. This effect is robust and persists even once we control for a wide variety of factors, including partisanship. Our results more broadly suggest that personal experiences -- as distinct from partisanship -- may influence how elite actors make decisions, but only in the context of substantively related areas.

  • Slides presented at 2011 European Political Science Association Annual Conference (Dublin, Ireland)

The U.S. Courts of Appeals Experiment: Modeling Randomization to Estimate the Causal Effects of Panel Assignment on Court Outcomes (with Adam Glynn)

Much has been written about the role that personal backgrounds and political ideology have on judicial outcomes.  This paper contributes to the scholarship on this issue in two important ways.  First, like Sunstein et al. (2006) (and to a lesser extent Boyd et al. (2010)), this paper looks at the composition of judicial panels rather than individual votes.  By taking this approach, the paper is able to leverage the fact that incoming cases to the U.S. Courts of Appeals are randomly assigned to three-judge panels for adjudication.  Second, and relatedly, by explicitly modeling this randomization mechanism, this paper develops methodology that quickly and accurately estimates the causal effects of different panel compositions -- including contrasting combinations of race, gender, ideological and professional backgrounds -- on judicial outcomes.  In this sense, our motivating question is whether panel composition has a causal effect on case outcomes.

  • Poster presented at 2010 Political Methodology Conference (Iowa City, IA)

Reconciling Race and Causation: Methods to Extract Meaningful Causal Inferences About Race (with Omar T. Wasow)

Causal inference is generally considered the gold standard in social science research. Experts have long warned, however, that causal inference is not possible without a reasonable means to manipulate units into treatment and control groups. Consequently, causal inference about immutable characteristics" such as race and gender is discouraged. We explain the potential outcomes framework, restate the intrinsic problems of race and causation, and propose two extensions to the prior literature that reconciles race and causation (in some cases). First, we argue that race should be de fined as a composite measure in which some elements are mutable. Second, we attempt to clarify units of analysis in which intrinsic problems of race and causal inference can be avoided. These two extensions, in turn, allow us to synthesize two areas of research in which causal inference regarding race may be permissible: (1) studies that measure the e ffect of exposing an individual or institution to some signal about race and (2) studies that disaggregate race into constituent pieces and attempt to measure the e ffect of some mutable element of race within a single racial group.

What Do DNA Ancestry Tests Reveal about Americans’ Identity? Examining Public Opinion on Race and Genomics (with Jennifer L. Hochschild) (Under Review)

The political and social implications of genomic science remain underdeveloped despite its great scientific import.  This article focuses on the impact of genomics on the meaning of race and of racial or ethnic identity.  Genomic ancestry testing may either blur racial boundaries by showing groups to be indistinct or mixed, or sharpen racial lines by revealing a person’s ancestral homogeneity or pointing toward a particular set of forebears. We hypothesize that media analyses will follow one of these two models, and that American  racial and ethnic groups will differ in response to blurring or sharpening genomic information. We evaluate these hypotheses through two new surveys and two content analyses of newspaper articles. What genomic scientists are finding differs from what the public prefers or is being taught by the media.  To most experts, genomics confirms some variation among population groups  but shows the incoherence of any concept of distinct races.  In contrast, journalists tend to reinforce the conventional five groups and the public generally prefers sharpening to blurring test results. Preferences differ some by race or ethnicity.  However, one survey suggests more support for blurring; when all Americans have access to genome sequencing, the politics of race and genomics may change dramatically.

Race, DNA, and Criminal Justice: Linking Public Opinion to Public Policy (with Jennifer L. Hochschild) 

Genomics research will soon affect many aspects of our lives, but its political associations and implications are only beginning to develop. This paper explores one such aspect: biobanks for law enforcement purposes. All states collect genetic information from serious offenders, and some from malfeasants, arrestees or immigrants subject to deportation.  DNA evidence and biobanks are frequently used to aid in prosecution and conviction and sometimes to exonerate those falsely convicted.  Some elites and advocacy groups find forensic biobanking deeply troubling, but the public endorses it and politicians usually promote it.

Scholars, on the other hand, know little about the political dynamics behind support or opposition.  We use a new survey of 4,200 American adults and a new module on the General Social Survey to investigate how the public understands and evaluates forensic databanks. We examine respondents’ self-declared awareness of biobanks, evaluation of biobanks’ social benefits and harms, views on funding and regulation, and willingness to contribute a DNA sample. We anticipate a positive relationship with scientific literacy, Republicanism, and self-interest, and a negative relationship with being African American.  Some, but not all, of these hypotheses are borne out.  Blacks (and sometimes Latinos) resist forensic biobanks more than whites, although majorities of all groups endorse them.  Those with more genetics knowledge are more supportive of this new technology. Republicans present a mixed picture: they trust law enforcement officials in this arena and resist federal regulation – but they also oppose increased public funding.  Finally, self-interest defined as susceptibility to crime has no discernible relationship to views on legal biobanks.

Courting Deliberation: The Role of Deliberative Democracy in the American Judicial System (Under Review)

Many legal theorists and political philosophers – among them John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, and Joshua Cohen – believe that deliberation is a desirable attribute and that decision making through deliberation is a normative ideal that yields both better laws as well as a positive transformation in its participants.  They further have assumed the judiciary is perhaps best equipped to realize this kind of “deliberative democracy,” and that the courts can effectively provide an example for other, less deliberative branches of government to follow.  This essay argues, however, that judicial deliberation is both more complicated than is assumed by these theorists and also embodies a kind of deliberation different in nature than the one we would expect in a deliberative model.  Indeed, contributions both from social science and from legal scholarship suggest that judges are strategic (and oftentimes political) actors, and that their “deliberations” are more like akin to bargaining than reasoned exchanges.  In addition, the products of judicial decision making – the courts’ opinions – often fail to reflect true deliberative reasoning.  Thus, the judiciary might in many ways be less deliberative than its sister branches. This is not to say that judicial processes cannot be modified to become more deliberative – and therefore more normatively desirable -- but it does suggest that the assumption that the courts provide a deliberative model for other decision makers to follow might be based on a romanticized view of judicial processes, rather than on the way judges actually behave.  This conclusion has, moreover, strong implications for the feasibility of deliberation as a decision making mechanism.