Trailblazers and those that followed : personal experiences, gender, and judicial empathy.

This paper investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination

Advocacy through briefs in the U.S. court of appeals.

The focus of this paper is to evaluate the role of advocates in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by examining the characterization of issues offered in appellate briefs against the issues addressed in the court\u27s decisions. Specifically, in an environment in which attorneys are expected to frame the issues on appeal and judges are expected to respond to those issues, what accounts for judges addressing some issues while suppressing others? By explicitly focusing on how the substantive content of an opinion is shaped, we depart from other, earlier scholarship on the advantages of repeat player litigants that primarily emphasizes who wins (and who loses) on appeal. Though this study is exploratory in its scope, we believe it does offer some important insights into the process of issue framing in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Diversity, deliberations, and judicial opinion writing.

Underlying scholarly interest in diversity is the premise that a representative body contributes to robust decision-making processes. Using an innovative measure of opinion content, we examine this premise by analyzing deliberative outputs in the US courts of appeals (1997-2002). While the presence of a single female or minority did not affect the attention to issues in the majority opinion, panels composed of a majority of women or minorities produced opinions with significantly more points of law compared to panels with three Caucasian males

The value of precedent : appellate briefs and judicial opinions in the U.S. courts of appeals.

This study of appellate advocacy examines factors that affect judicial treatment of precedents identified in litigant briefs. Although we find some attorney and party characteristics influence whether a court addresses precedent cited by a party, legal resources are not as influential in determining whether the court adopts a party’s use of a precedent. At times, ideological congruence between the circuit panel and the litigant can increase the likelihood that the court’s opinion will use a precedent in the same way as presented by the litigants. There is also some support for the importance of attorney experience. Even when their clients ultimately win the case, attorneys with no experience before the circuit are less likely to see the court use litigant-cited precedents in a similar way to the party brief. Even when their clients lose, there is some support to show that attorneys with more experience are more likely to see the court’s opinion address the precedents the attorneys have raised positively. This suggests that attorney experience has some influence in shaping legal policy, regardless of whether the litigant wins or loses