Collaborative Research: Judicial Diversity and Appellate Decision Making

截至2016年底，超过三分之一的联邦上诉法院法官是女性，超过五分之一是少数民族。这些数字与40年前形成鲜明对比，当时同样的上诉法院只有一名女性和三名少数族裔法官在职。本研究运用社会科学的理论和方法来研究联邦法院历史性的人口结构变化是如何影响美国巡回上诉法院的审议、意见书撰写和组织实践的。这些发现将为在联邦法院系统的司法管理中发挥重要作用的中级上诉法院提供新的重要见解。数据收集自美国上诉法院发表的司法意见、传记材料和公开的口头陈述，以检验社会科学理论中关于多样性对司法决策影响的不同观点。一组理论关注的是与种族和性别相关的个人的不同观点如何影响小团体的决策。另一组理论预测，口头辩论期间的互动以及随后对观点的引用将反映出对性别、种族、地位和权力的刻板印象的社会过程。最后，关于性别和种族认同的理论预测，女性和少数族裔法官将为口头辩论、合作和意见起草带来新的方法。为了测试这些不同的期望，本研究利用语言软件和自动化内容分析方法的最新进展，生成了一个新的意见内容数据集，并扩展了现有的公共资源，即美国上诉法院判决的多用户数据库。

By the end of 2016, over one-third of the federal appeals court bench was made up of women and over one-fifth were racial minorities. These figures stand in stark contrast to forty years earlier when the same appellate courts counted just one woman and three minority judges on active service. This study uses social science theories and methods to examine how this historic demographic transformation of the federal bench affects deliberations, opinion writing, and organizational practices on the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals. These findings will offer new and important insights on the intermediate appellate courts that serve a vital role in the administration of justice in the federal court system. Data are collected from published judicial opinions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, biographical materials, and publicly available transcribed oral arguments, to test competing perspectives from social science theories about the effects of diversity on judicial decision making. One set of theories focuses on the way in which differing perspectives of individuals linked to race and gender affect small group decision making. Another set of theories predicts that interactions during oral argument and subsequent citations to opinions will reflect on societal processes that generalize stereotypes about gender, race, status, and power. Finally, theories on gender and racial identity predict that women and minority judges will bring new approaches to oral argument, collaboration, and opinion drafting. To test these various expectations, this study leverages recent advances in linguistic software and automated methods of content analysis to produce a novel dataset of opinion content and extend an existing public resource, the Multi-User Database of U.S. Courts of Appeals Decisions.