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Do Justices Defend the Speech They Hate?

An Analysis of In-Group Bias on the US Supreme Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Lee Epstein ,
Christopher M. Parker  and
Jeffrey A. Segal
Lee Epstein
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
Christopher M. Parker*
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Jeffrey A. Segal
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
*
Contact the corresponding author, Christopher M. Parker, at cmparker@uri.edu.
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Abstract

For decades now, experiments have revealed that we humans tend to evaluate the views or activities of our own group and its members more favorably than those of outsiders. To assess convergence between experimental and observational results, we explore whether US Supreme Court justices fall prey to in-group bias in freedom-of-expression cases. A two-level hierarchical model of all votes cast between the 1953 and 2014 terms confirms that they do. Although liberal justices are (overall) more supportive of free-speech claims than conservative justices, the votes of both liberal and conservative justices tend to reflect their preferences toward the speech’s ideological grouping and not solely an underlying taste for (or against) greater protection for expression. These results suggest the importance of new research programs aimed at evaluating how other cognitive biases identified in experimental work may influence judicial behavior in actual court decisions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Fall 2018 , pp. 237 - 262
Copyright
© 2018 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinksi, and Andrew J. Wistrich, whose experiments inspired us to write this article; to Gad Barzilai, Rebecca Brown, John Drobak, David Klein, Micheal Giles, Linda Greenhouse, Anna Harvey, Leonie Huddy, Adam Liptak, Todd E. Pettys, Richard A. Posner, Nancy Staudt, Eugene Volokh, Ed Whelan, and the anonymous reviewers for useful insights; to participants at workshops or courses at Duke University School of Law, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the University of Haifa School of Law, the Faculty of Law at the University of São Paulo, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Washington University School of Law for their feedback; and to Andrew D. Martin and Kevin Quinn for reestimating their Martin-Quinn scores without the cases we use in this article. Epstein thanks the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Washington University for supporting her work on judicial behavior. All materials necessary to replicate our study are at http://epstein.wustl.edu/research/InGroupBias.html.

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