App Stats: Sen on "Natural Experiments, Judicial Quality, and Racial Bias in Federal Appellate Review" 

 We hope you can join us this Wednesday, September 21, 2011 for the  Applied Statistics Workshop .  Maya Sen , a Ph.D. candidate from the  Department of Government  at Harvard University, will give a practice job talk entitled "Natural Experiments, Judicial Quality, and Racial Bias in Federal Appellate Review". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. 

 "Natural Experiments, Judicial Quality, and Racial Bias in Federal Appellate Review" 
Maya Sen 
Government Department, Harvard University 
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)  
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 12.00 pm 

 Abstract: 
 In this paper, I find that cases decided by black federal lower-court judges are consistently overturned more often than cases authored by similar white judges. I estimate this effect by leveraging the fact that incoming cases to the U.S. courts are randomly assigned to judges, which ensures that black and white judges hear similar sorts of cases. The effect is robust and persists after matching exactly on measures for judicial quality (including quality ratings assigned by the American Bar Association (ABA)), previous professional and judicial experience, and partisanship. Moreover, by looking more closely at the ABA ratings scores awarded to judicial nominees, I demonstrate that this effect is unlikely to be attributable exclusively to differences between black and white judges in terms of quality. This study is the first to explore how higher-court judges evaluate opinions written by judges of color and it has clear normative implications: attempts to make the judiciary more reflective of the general population may have actually resulted in inequality in the aggregate, both for litigants and for judicial actors.