Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-30-2010
Abstract
Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African-American and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, which includes felony cases from Cook County, Illinois, we find statistically significant between-judge variation in incarceration rates, although not in sentence lengths.
Keywords
Criminal law, racial discrimination, race and criminal justice, punishment, sentencing, bias, incarceration rate, sentence length, Monte Carlo simulation, empirical research, forecasting and simulation, accounting for disparities in judicial behavior, crime, law and economics, law and economics of crime
Publication Title
Journal of Legal Studies
Repository Citation
Abrams, David S.; Bertrand, Marianne; and Mullainathan, Sendhil, "Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?" (2010). All Faculty Scholarship. 355.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/355
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Judges Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons
Publication Citation
41 Journal of Legal Studies 347 (June 2012).