Judicial behavior in disability cases: do judge sex and race matter?

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Acknowledgements

Boyd acknowledges support for this project from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SES-1626932). We also appreciate the excellent research assistance from Kasey Clarke, Madison Conkel, Melissa Hawkins, Elise Hynd, Colin Philips, Alexandra Poth, Ted Rossier, Jake Truscott, and additional students listed on the project webpage: http://clboyd.net/SSAtrial.html. We gratefully thank conference organizers Valerie Hoekstra, Jennet Kirkpatrick, and Miki Kittilson for the opportunity to participate.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 These four districts were selected for study in this preliminary data analysis project because they were the first districts with finalized data collection. The districts represent variety in how generous their judges are when reviewing SSA disability appeals. For example, the District of Arizona’s overall rate of pro-claimant outcomes in the data is over 56% while, by comparison, Eastern District of Kentucky’s overall rate pro-claimant outcome rate is just 35%. These districts’ 8 racial minority and 17 female Article III district and Article I magistrate judges also provide ample judicial characteristic variation to allow us to begin to generalize to broader district and magistrate judge behavior.

2 The same would likely be true for claimant race. Unfortunately, even when completed, the SSA Project Data will not include claimant race due to its very rare availability in the case documents.

Additional information

Funding

Boyd acknowledges support for this project from the National Science Foundation [grant number SES-1626932].