https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00494-x
Research
Language and the use of law are predictive of judge gender and seniority
1
Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007, Tarragona, Spain
2
Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028, Barcelona, Spain
3
UNESCO Housing Chair, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43003, Tarragona, Spain
4
ICREA, 08010, Barcelona, Spain
d
marta.sales@urv.cat
e
roger.guimera@urv.cat
Received:
6
March
2024
Accepted:
11
August
2024
Published online:
2
September
2024
There are examples of how unconscious bias can influence actions of people. In the judiciary, however, despite some examples there is no general theory on whether different demographic attributes such as gender, seniority or ethnicity affect case sentencing. We aim to gain insight into this issue by analyzing over 100k decisions of three different areas of law with the goal of understanding whether judge identity or judge attributes such as gender and seniority can be inferred from decision documents. We find that stylistic features of decisions are predictive of judge identities, their gender and their seniority, a finding that is aligned with results from analysis of written texts outside the judiciary. Surprisingly, we find that features based on legislation cited are also predictive of judge identities and attributes. While own content reuse by judges can explain our ability to predict judge identities, no specific reduced set of features can explain the differences we find in the legislation cited of decisions when we group judges by gender or seniority. Our findings open the door for further research on how these differences translate into how judges apply the law and, ultimately, to promote a more transparent and fair judiciary system.
Key words: Gender differences / Topic model / Judicial decisions
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00494-x.
© The Author(s) 2024
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