Alumni Relationships and Judicial Bias
28 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2020 Last revised: 27 Mar 2024
Date Written: October 15, 2020
Abstract
We examine whether law school alumni relationships between lawyers and judges is correlated with case outcomes. We show that, in the context of medical malpractice lawsuits filed in Florida, having a plaintiff's attorney who attended the same law school as a randomly assigned judge increases the chances of recovery by about 2 percentage points. We further show that the effect is more pronounced between lawyers and judges with a larger age gap, consistent with an age-dependent effect rather than a personal relationship effect from lawyers and judges who overlapped in school. Our results suggest that case outcomes can be biased when lawyers and judges are part of the same affinity groups.
Keywords: lawyers, law school, judges, judge bias, returns to schooling
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Liu, Tianwang and Zhang, David, Alumni Relationships and Judicial Bias (October 15, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3711873 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3711873
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