Legal History Commons^™

Inside The Bankruptcy Judge's Mind, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, we extend our prior work on generalist judges to explore whether specialization leads to superior judicial decision making. To do so, we report the results of a study of federal bankruptcy judges. In one prior study of bankruptcy judges, Ted Eisenberg reported evidence suggesting that bankruptcy judges, like generalist judges, are susceptible to the "self-serving" or "egocentric" bias when making judgments. Here, we report evidence showing that bankruptcy judges are vulnerable to anchoring and framing effects, but appear largely unaffected by the omission bias, a debtor's race, a debtor's apology, and "terror management" or "mortality salience."'

Because …

Cognitive Errors, Individual Differences, And Paternalism, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal scholars commonly argue that the widespread presence of cognitive errors in judgment justifies legal intervention to save people from predictable mistakes. Such arguments often fail to account for individual variation in the commission of such errors even though individual variation is probably common. If predictable groups of people avoid making the errors that others commit, then law should account for such differences because those who avoid errors will not benefit from paternalistic interventions and indeed may be harmed by them. The research on individual variation suggests three parameters that might distinguish people who can avoid error: cognitive ability, experience …