Religious intensity as social insurance may explain why fiscal and social conservatives and fiscal and social liberals tend to come hand-in-hand. We find evidence that religious groups with greater within-group charitable giving are more against the welfare state and more socially conservative....

Turning to courts to vindicate rights often led to resistance and subsequent acceptance.We formalize these effects in a model where laws can generate temporary backlash. We then exploit two layers of judge randomization to estimate effects of abortion jurisprudence using all abortion appellate...

I find that judges assign 8% longer sentences to defendants whose first initials match their own. Name letter effects amplify when the first and second letter of the name match, when the entire name matches, when the name letter is rare, and appear for roughly all judges. The effects are larger...

Does obscenity law corrode moral values and does it matter? Using random judge assignment and all U.S. obscenity precedents since 1958, we present four main results. Progressive laws liberalized sexual attitudes and behaviors, reduced child abuse, but increased asymptomatic STDs. We document...

Federal courts are a mainstay of the justice system in the United States. In this study, we analyze 387,898 cases from U.S. Courts of Appeals, where judges are randomly assigned to panels of three. We predict which judge dissents against co-panelists and analyze the dominant features that...

During World War I, the British military condemned over 3,000 soldiers to death, but only executed 12%; the others received commuted sentences. Many historians believe that the military command confirmed or commuted sentences for reasons unrelated to the circumstances of a particular case and...

Previous studies suggest a significant role of language in the court room, yet none has identified a definitive correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes. This paper demonstrates that voice-based snap judgments based solely on the introductory sentences of lawyers arguing in...

Politicians' behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges.Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just...

The emphasis on “fit” as a hiring criterion has raised the spectrum of a new form of subtle discrimination (Yoshino 1998; Bertrand and Duflo 2016). Under complete markets, correlations between employee characteristics and outcomes persist only if there exists animus for the marginal employer...

In the United States, foreign nationals who fear persecution in their home country can apply for asylum under the Refugee Act of 1980. Over the past decade, legal scholarship has uncovered significant disparities in asylum adjudication by judge, by region of the United States in which the...