AbstractAre 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, in which 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.
Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Journal of Legal Studies (JLS) publishes interdisciplinary academic research about law and legal institutions. It emphasizes social science approaches, especially those of economics, political science, and psychology, but it also publishes the work of historians, philosophers, and others who are interested in legal theory and use social science methods.
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