The Behavior of Women State Supreme Court Justices: Are They Tokens or Outsiders?

Abstract

The voting behavior of fourteen women state supreme court justices in three issue areas ? women's issues, criminal rights and economic liberties ? is used to determine if women justices behave as Tbker?s or as compared to their male counterparts. Applying Ranter's (1977a, 1977b) analysis of tokenism to appellate courts, we define Token behavior as voting in conformity with the male majority. Outsider behavior is defined in terms of extreme voting patterns in accordance with work done by Ducat and Flango (1985). We find that women justices tend to be Outsiders and hold the extreme position on all three issues examined, that is: on women's issues they tend to be the most prowoman member of a court; and, on both criminal rights and economic liberties they tend to be either the extreme liberal or the extreme conservative member of the court.

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