Juvenile Court Outcomes for Retail Offenders: An Examination of Offense Type, Sex, and Race/Ethnicity

Using all delinquency referrals in a Northeast state, the current study examined how youth charged with retail offenses differed from other offense types across multiple juvenile court outcomes (i.e., petition, adjudication, and disposition). The individual and joint effects of a juvenile’s sex and race/ethnicity were also investigated to determine whether these extralegal factors conditioned the relationship between offense type and juvenile system processing. Findings indicate that at each decision-making stage, retail offenders were significantly more likely to be treated with leniency compared to other offense types. The results also reinforced the continued impact of sex and race/ethnicity on shaping judicial outcomes at each stage. Implications regarding the processing of juvenile retail offenders and the influence of juvenile characteristics on juvenile court decision-making are discussed.

The Attorneys’ Gender: Exploring Counsel Success before the U.S. Supreme Court

Stereotypes are powerful heuristics structuring decision-making, with research suggesting that gender-based stereotypes place women at a professional disadvantage. This paper tests whether attorneys’ gender influences Supreme Court outcomes. We construct an attorney-focused data set combining personal and professional attributes with case-level characteristics from 1946 to 2016. Our approach brings clarity to previous findings, enabling a longitudinal analysis of women participation before the Court. We find that attorney gender does not influence party success. In doing so, we show that a more nuanced approach is needed when studying the intersection between judicial outcomes and attorney traits.

Identification of Judicial Outcomes in Judgments: A Generalized Gini-PLS Approach

This paper presents and compares several text classification models that can be used to extract the outcome of a judgment from justice decisions, i.e., legal documents summarizing the different rulings made by a judge. Such models can be used to gather important statistics about cases, e.g., success rate based on specific characteristics of cases’ parties or jurisdiction, and are therefore important for the development of Judicial prediction not to mention the study of Law enforcement in general. We propose in particular the generalized Gini-PLS which better considers the information in the distribution tails while attenuating, as in the simple Gini-PLS, the influence exerted by outliers. Modeling the studied task as a supervised binary classification, we also introduce the LOGIT-Gini-PLS suited to the explanation of a binary target variable. In addition, various technical aspects regarding the evaluated text classification approaches which consists of combinations of representations of judgments and classification algorithms are studied using an annotated corpora of French justice decisions.

THE SUPREME COURT AS AN ARENA FOR ACTIVISM: FEMINIST CAUSE LAWYERING’S INFLUENCE ON JUDICIAL DECISION MAKING*

Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. feminist movement litigators organized public-interest legal organizations to promote women’s rights through legal mobilization in the courts. We investigate all U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving gender equality from 1965 to 2016 to discern the impact of involvement of these feminist movement litigation groups as legal counsel. Our findings show that organized feminist cause lawyers increase the likelihood of decisions expanding women’s legal rights and/or promoting gender equality. Our results also indicate that broader legal and political opportunities combine with legal-activist efforts to produce these judicial outcomes. However, when the Supreme Court is highly conservative regarding abortion rights, feminist cause lawyers face difficulty winning cases. Our research suggests the importance for movement scholars of considering activist litigation, and our findings indicate that a theory of the joint effects of activist legal mobilization and broader legal/political opportunities can explain the judicial outcomes movement actors seek.

Expert medico-legal reports: The relationship between levels of consistency and judicial outcomes in asylum seekers in the Netherlands

Introduction: If asylum applicants need to prove that they have been persecuted in their home country, expert judgment of the psychological and physical consequences of torture may support the judicial process. Expert medico-legal reports can be used to assess whether the medical complaints of the asylum seeker are consistent with their asylum account. It is unclear which factors influence medical expert judgement about the consistency between an asylum seeker’s symptoms and story, and to what extent expert medico-legal reports are associated with judicial outcomes. Methods: We analysed 97 medico-legal reports on traumatised asylum seekers in the Netherlands. First, we evaluated the impact of trauma-related and other variables on experts’ judgments of the consistency of symptoms and story. Second, we evaluated the effect of experts’ judgments of symptom-story consistency on subsequent judicial outcomes. Results: Gender, receipt of mental health care and trauma-related variables were associated with symptomstory consistency. Positive asylum decisions were predicted by expert judgments about the presence of physical signs and symptoms of torture, and ill-treatment and their consistency with the refugee’s story, but not psychological symptoms. Conclusion: These results suggest that standardised procedures for the documenting of medical evidence by independent experts can improve judicial decision quality and the need to improve psychological and psychiatric assessments.