Overview

Until President Jimmy Carter launched an effort to diversify the lower federal courts, the U.S. courts of appeals had been composed almost entirely of white males. But by 2008, over a quarter of sitting judges were women and 15 percent were African American or Hispanic. Underlying the argument made by administration officials for a diverse federal judiciary has been the expectation that the presence of women and minorities will ensure that the policy of the courts will reflect the experiences of a diverse population. Yet until now, scholarly studies have offered only limited support for the expectation that judges’ race, ethnicity, or gender impacts their decision making on the bench. In Diversity Matters, Susan B. Haire and Laura P. Moyer employ innovative new methods of analysis to offer a fresh examination of the effects of diversity on the many facets of decision making in the federal appellate courts. Drawing on oral histories and data on appellate decisions through 2008, the authors’ analyses demonstrate that diversity on the bench affects not only individual judges’ choices but also the overall character and quality of judicial deliberation and decisions. Looking forward, the authors anticipate the ways in which these process effects will become more pronounced as a result of the highly diverse Obama appointment cohort.

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Reviews

Diversity Matters is a substantial contribution both to judicial decision-making scholarship and to gender/race scholarship. The authors offer a rich theoretical framework, deploy a rigorous and well-suited analytic strategy, and provide an engaging discussion of what their evidence indicates with regard to the role of gender, race, and ethnicity in judging.--Wendy L. Martinek, Binghamton University

Diversity Matters is a landmark study and is one of the most important judicial politics books to be published in recent years. It is theoretically and empirically rich, methodologically sophisticated, exceptionally well written, and easy to follow. Diversity Matters should be of great interest to students of the courts, American politics, and gender/racial/ethnic studies. It is timely as it provides a preview of the expected impact of President Obama's historic levels of bench diversification. In other words, this is a must-read book.--Sheldon Goldman, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt through Reagan

Author Information

Susan B. Haire, coauthor with Donald Songer and Reginald Sheehan of Continuity and Change on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Georgia, USA. Laura P. Moyer is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, USA.

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