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Judges

Political Science

2011

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Legal Ethics And Campaign Contributions: The Professional Responsibility To Pay For Justice, Keith Swisher Jan 2011

Legal Ethics And Campaign Contributions: The Professional Responsibility To Pay For Justice, Keith Swisher

Keith Swisher

Lawyers as johns, and judges as prostitutes? Across the United States, attorneys (“johns,” as the analogy goes) are giving campaign money to judges (“prostitutes”) and then asking those judges for legal favors in the form of rulings for themselves and their clients. Despite its pervasiveness, this practice has been rarely mentioned, much less theorized, from the attorneys’ ethical point of view. With the surge of money into judicial elections (e.g., Citizens United v. FEC), and the Supreme Court’s renewed interest in protecting justice from the corrupting effects of campaign money (e.g., Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.), these conflicting currents …


Judging Women, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Mirya R. Holman, Eric A. Posner Jan 2011

Judging Women, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Mirya R. Holman, Eric A. Posner

Mirya R Holman

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be better than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. For many of our tests, we fail to find significant gender effects on judicial performance. Where we do find significant gender effects for …