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Gender and Judicial Replacement

The Case of US State Supreme Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Nancy B. Arrington
Nancy B. Arrington*
Affiliation:
Emory University
*
Contact the author at [email protected].
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Abstract

Employing a matching design on US state supreme court vacancies and replacements from 1970 to 2016, I demonstrate that patterns of judicial replacement are gendered. Vacancies made by women are filled by women at a greater rate than vacancies made by men, and vacancies made by men are filled by men at a greater rate than vacancies made by women. To examine whether these patterns of replacement have systematically suppressed or advantaged the selection of women judges, I compare judicial selections to the gender composition of lawyers. Women are selected to state supreme courts at rates that parallel the gender diversity of lawyers over time, which suggests that gendered patterns of replacement have neither advantaged nor excluded women from state supreme courts in the aggregate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 2018 , pp. 127 - 154
Copyright
© 2018 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Thank you to Jeffrey Staton, Beth Reingold, Adam Glynn, the members of the Emory Law and Courts Working Group, and the reviewers for all their thoughtful feedback and suggestions.

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