Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

By David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan. 2012

342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Law, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Crystal S. Yang
2. Alma Cohen
3. A. Alesina
4. Eliana La Ferrara
5. Steven Mello
6. Yiling Chen
7. Felipe M. Goncalves
8. Seth R. Flaxman

In Law

1. Bryce Goodman
2. Alma Cohen
3. Seth R. Flaxman
4. Crystal S. Yang

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Crystal S. Yang
2. Alma Cohen
3. Eliana La Ferrara
4. Ben Green
5. A. Alesina
6. Bryce Goodman
7. Steven Mello
8. Yiling Chen

Citations in the corpus

• European Union Regulations on Algorithmic Decision-Making and a "Right to Explanation" (2016, background): “…extraneous and ethically inappropriate factors in human decision making is well documented (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman (1974); Danziger et al. (2011); Abrams et al. (2012)), and discriminatory decision making is pervasive in many of the sectors where algorithmic pro-filing might be introduced (e.g.…”
• A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing (2017, background): “…by discrimination on the part of police officers, judges, and other criminal justice agents (Knowles et al., 2001; Anwar and Fang, 2006; Grogger and Ridgeway, 2006; Antonovics and Knight, 2009; Persico, 2009; Abrams et al., 2012; Horrace and Rohlin, 2016; Fryer, 2018; Arnold et al., 2018).”
• Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions (2019, methodology): “Yijtc = β0 + β1 ∗Republicanij + β2 ∗Blacki + β3 ∗ Femalei + β4 ∗Republicanij ∗Blacki + β5 ∗Republicanij ∗ Femalei + Xi + γt + κc + ijtc (1)”
• Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data (2019, result): “As one final example, several studies have documented racial bias by judges in criminal sentencing (Alesina and Ferrara 2014; Glaeser and Sacerdote 2003; Abrams et al. 2012).”
• Let My People Go: Ethnic In‐Group Bias in Judicial Decisions—Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment (2010, neutral): “…bias as implicit bias How should we account for the evidence for ethnic in-group bias in the decision to release or detain, and the lack of such bias in the decision on the length of detention, which also mirrors similar findings in the context of sentencing (Johnson 2006, Abrams et al. 2008)?”
• A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing (2014, background): “…recent papers exploit random variation to test if there are systematic differences across judges in the racial gap in sentencing for felony crimes ( Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan 2012 or if there is evidence of bias in felony trial outcomes depending on the racial composition of the jury (…”
• Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns (2020, background): “(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)”
• Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles (2018, neutral): “It is well-documented that inequalities exist in the application of the law to different groups of individuals (e.g., Argys and Mocan 2004; Shayo and Zussman 2011; Abrams et al. 2012; Alesina and La Ferrara 2015).”
• Disparate Interactions: An Algorithm-in-the-Loop Analysis of Fairness in Risk Assessments (2019, background): “Studies have shown that judges harbor implicit biases and that racial disparities in incarceration rates are due in part to dierential judicial decisions across race [1, 54].”