Diversity in the judiciary: how diversity matters for democratic inclusion, representation, and inequalities

ABSTRACT

While a rich and developed body of literature focuses on questions of diversity in legislatures, a growing body of scholarship addresses these questions for the judiciary. This burgeoning area of study presents several challenges, three of which are illuminated by papers in this Dialogue section. As the papers show, these three research challenges are empirical and normative. By bringing together political theory and empirical research, and by focusing on both the US and comparative judiciaries, the essays build our understanding of processes of representation in the judiciary and the complexities of the relationships between race, ethnicity, and gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Judiciary
• courts
• inclusion
• diversity
• representation
• gender
• race

Acknowledgements

This Dialogue section grew out of the February 2019 workshop “Diversity in the Judiciary: How Diversity Matters for Democratic Inclusion, Representation, and Inequalities” funded by the Kopf Conference Fund in the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. The conference was organized by Valerie Hoekstra, Jennet Kirkpatrick and Miki Caul Kittilson, and the pieces in this section were presented there. We thank J. Jarpa Dawuni, Margaret Hanson, Rodney Hero, Helene Landemore, Stefanie Lindquist, Marie Provine, and Sarah Shair-Rosenfield for their valuable discussion and feedback on these papers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This Dialogue section grew out of the February 2019 workshop “Diversity in the Judiciary: How Diversity Matters for Democratic Inclusion, Representation, and Inequalities” funded by the Kopf Conference Fund in the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.