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Justice Isn’t Blind: Attorney Attractiveness and Success in US Federal Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2024

Nicholas W. Waterbury Open the ORCID record for Nicholas W. Waterbury [Opens in a new window]
Nicholas W. Waterbury*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Springfield †
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many court observers have argued that judges are capable of avoiding the use of extraneous factors in decision-making. This study examines the influence of seemingly irrelevant heuristics on real-world courtroom proceedings. Drawing on theories from neighboring disciplines, I hypothesize that physically attractive attorneys have greater success in US federal court. Using a generalizable causal inference strategy and a dataset of over 1,000 cases and 3,000 votes, I find support for my expectations using multiple measures of attractiveness. These findings raise serious normative concerns about equality and underscore the need to adjust traditional models of judicial behavior to account for inherent biases.

Keywords

judicial behaviorpolitical psychologydecision-makingattractiveness
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , October 2024 , pp. 413 - 434
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Assistant Research Director, Center for State Policy and Leadership, PAC 464, One University Place, Springfield, IL 62703; [email protected].

The author thanks Joshua Boston, Lee Epstein, Pauline Kim, William Lowry, Andrew Martin, Jessica Schoenherr, Alan Simmons, James Spriggs, Amy Steigerwalt, Justin Wedeking, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments in the creation of this article. Previous versions of this study were presented at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, at the 2021 New Directions in Law and Society Workshop at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and at a 2022 meeting of the Washington University in St. Louis American Politics Workshop. Replication materials are available at the Journal of Law and Courts Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OVMN95.

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