Gender Differentials in Judicial Deliberation

Abstract

Women in the judiciary are critically understudied, especially when it comes to their deliberation behavior at early stages in the judicial process that culminate in the ultimate opinion of the court. With record numbers of women appointed to the federal bench in the last decade, it has become all the more important to ascertain any gendered differences in judicial behavior. This dissertation project seeks to do just that, analyzing the conditions under which gender differentials in judicial behavior occur at three distinct phases of the appellate process. In the first substantive chapter of the dissertation, I use a novel dataset of nearly 9,000 cases to evaluate whether women judges are more discerning during case intake, reading case materials, attorney briefs, and relevant cases more carefully than peer men. I ultimately find that women author opinions that are longer and more citation-dense as compared to similar men. The second substantive chapter considers judicial speech behavior at oral argument, finding that women judges and attorneys use a higher proportion of positive-toned interruptions, possibly indicating more affiliative behavior in this deliberation environment. Finally, the third substantive chapter examines the collaborative process of opinion writing. While I initially predict that women judges will indicate a higher willingness to attain consensus on a case, I find that they are actually more likely to author non-unanimous opinions and write discretionary separate opinions more frequently when not tasked with majority authorship. Throughout the project I analyze why these gender differentials may be occurring as well as what the possible implications are of such differences.