Articlehybrid2024

Can Law Students Replace Judges in Experiments of Judicial Decision-Making?

24 citations0/0 files storedJournal of law & empirical analysis.

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Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Legal processes and jurisprudence Judicial and Constitutional Studies

Abstract

Experimental research on judicial decision-making is hampered by the difficulty of recruiting judges as experimental participants. Can students be used in judges’ stead? Unfortunately, no. We ran the same high-context 2×2 factorial experiment of judicial decision-making focused on legal reasoning with 31 U.S. federal judges and 91 elite U.S. law students. We obtained diametrically opposed results. Judges’ decisions were strongly associated with one factor (sympathy, i.e., bias) but not the other (law). For students, it was the other way around. Equality between the two groups is strongly rejected. Equality of document-view patterns—a proxy for thought processes—and written reasons is also strongly rejected.

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References

2006Mechanism of Motivated Reasoning? Analogical Perception in Discrimination Disputes 2016Justice Is Less Blind, and Less Legalistic, than We Thought: Evidence from an Experiment with Real Judges 1999Effects of lawyers' socio-political attitudes on their judgments of social science in legal decision making.2015Heart versus Head: Do Judges Follow the Law or Follow Their Feelings?2016“Ideology” or “Situation Sense”? An Experimental Investigation of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment 2015Can Judges Make Reliable Numeric Judgments? Distorted Damages and Skewed Sentences

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