Do Judges with Daughters Rule Differently on "Women's Issues" Than Those Who Don't Have Daughters

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Christopher McKinney

The Harvard Social Statistics Blog has an abstract of an article that sounds interesting.  The title of article is “Female Socialization: How Having Daughters Affect Judges’ Voting on Women’s Issues”

  Here is the abstract:

Social scientists have long maintained that women judges might behave different than their male colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al. (2010)). This is particularly true when it comes to highly charged social issues such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and the status of gender as a suspect classification under federal law. Less studied has been the role that a judge’s family might have on judicial decision making. For example, we may think that a male judge with daughters might have different views of gender discrimination and sexual harassment than a male judge without any daughters. This paper takes a look at the question causally by leveraging the hypothesis that, conditional on the number of total number of children, the probability of a judge having a boy or a girl is independent of any covariates (Washington 2008). Looking at data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals, we find that conditional on the number of children, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more liberal fashion on gender issues than judges without daughters. This effect is particularly strong among Republican appointed judges and is robust and persists even once we control for a wide variety of factors. Our results more broadly suggest that personal experiences — as distinct from partisanship — may influence how elite actors make decisions, but only in the context of substantively salient issues.

 

The abstract appears to indicate that the effect of having daughters appears to be one of liberalizing one's opinions on such issues if they were formally conservative.  I would be interested to see if this or any other study indicates that broadening one's horizons or personally witnessing the experiences that other groups in our society must face ever has the effect of making one's opinions more conservative.  In any event, it sounds like an interesting study.  

 

 Hat tip: Jottings of an Employer's Lawyer

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Judicial emergency may be on the horizon in the Western District of Texas

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Christopher McKinney

For many lawyers around the country, an ever increasing frustration is the problem with the inability of the Court's to get important cases - our cases - to trial in in federal court.  This is largely due to the two factors: (1) the (in my humble opinion) ill-advised federalization of virtually all but the smallest drug crimes; and (2) the inability of Congress to act in a professional manner and confirm federal judges to the bench - regardless of which party is in control.  

The problem here in the Western District of Texas is getting to be extreme.  According to a recent article, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, chief judge of the Western District of Texas, is speaking out about the issue.  In a recent filing, he states that while his jurisdiction has not yet reached a judicial emergency because of its giant criminal docket, it’s getting pretty close. Biery said as much in a concurrence he filed Feb. 8.

Biery writes:

“In 2010, the eleven active judges of the Western District of Texas, spread over 90,000 square miles, had 8,738 felony defendants and 3,080 civil cases added to their dockets, a weighted average of 754 compared to the national average of 490 cases per judge, a ratio not unlike other border courts.... While it is not yet necessary to declare a judicial emergency in the Western District of Texas, that option approaches on the horizon with all of the additional costs of housing prisoners and delay in the resolution of civil cases.”

 

Read the entire story by John Council at Texas Lawyer's Tex Parte Blog.

 

 

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Sheryl Sandberg on why we have too few women leaders.

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Christopher McKinney

     Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looks at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offers 3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite.

     Long before Sheryl Sandberg left Google to join Facebook as its Chief Operating Officer in 2008, she was a fan. Today she manages Facebook’s sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications. It’s a massive job, but one well suited to Sandberg, who not only built and managed Google’s successful online sales and operations program but also served as an economist for the World Bank and Chief of Staff at the US Treasury Department.

     Sandberg’s experience navigating the the complex and socially sensitive world of international economics has proven useful as she and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg work to strike a balance between helping Facebook users control privacy while finding ways to monetize its most valuable asset: data. 

 

 

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