Black Judges Essay

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Are Judges Politicians in Black Robes? Each year thousands of cases come before judges throughout the country. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that “the aggregate number of newly filed, reopened, and reactivated cases reported to the Court Statistics Project (CSP) from the nation’s state courts reached a record high 102.4 million incoming cases in 2006.” With the number of court cases only growing, it is clear that judges have an immense amount of influence throughout the United Sates. However, the pertinent question becomes; are these case decisions made by judges who are motivated by their ideological beliefs or are judges able to interpret the letter of the law without allowing political bias into the court room? The overwhelming …show more content…
‘Situation Sense’? An Experimental Study of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment. In this study they attempted to see if judges were in fact political. They posed the question “If you leave a water bottle out for someone else to pick it up later is it littering?” Then they asked judges these questions with added variables such as “immigrant-rights group left the sealed bottles of water because they were expecting illegal immigrants to be crossing through on their journey from Mexico to the U.S” or “the sealed water bottle was left by construction workers building a border fence to stop immigration.” The theory was that when determining if the water bottle was litter or not, the circumstances around why it was left should not matter. The scholars found that “in deciding these specific legal cases, judges were far less influenced by their ideology than members of the public. In other words, whether a judge was personally inclined to support or oppose immigration made much less difference in whether he found the water bottle “litter” or “debris” than it did for a non-lawyer,”(Evans 1). The significance of this finding is that judges use more than their personal opinions to dictate decision making. The structured way of analyzing a case and applying the law to that case often times allows judges to rule cases in a manner that may not align with their personal political
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