We seek to contribute to an understanding of how judicial elections affect the incentives and decisions of judges. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that judges who are concerned about their reputation would tend to "decide against their prior" as they approach elections. That is, judges...

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants...

Individuals who engage in “judging” – that is, rendering a determination in a dispute or contest between two parties – might be influenced by public pressure to favor one of the parties. Many rules and arrangements seek to insulate such individuals from public pressure or to address the...