Abstract

In our lab, 299 real judges from seven major jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and USA) spend up to fifty-five minutes to judge an international criminal appeals case and determine the appropriate prison sentence. The lab computer (i) logs their use of the documents (briefs, statement of facts, trial judgment, statute, precedent) and (ii) randomly assigns each judge (a) a horizontal precedent disfavoring, favoring, or strongly favoring defendant, (b) a sympathetic or an unsympathetic defendant, and (c) a short, medium, or long sentence anchor. Document use and written reasons differ between countries but not between common and civil law. Precedent effect is barely detectable and estimated to be less, and bounded to be not much greater than, that of legally irrelevant defendant attributes and sentence anchors.

Details

Title
Judges in the Lab: No Precedent Effects, No Common/Civil Law Differences
Author
Spamann, Holger 1 ; Klöhn, Lars 2 ; Jamin, Christophe 3 ; Khanna, Vikramaditya 4 ; John Zhuang Liu 5 ; Mamidi, Pavan 6 ; Morell, Alexander 7 ; Reidel, Ivan 8 

 Lawrence R. Grove Professor, Harvard Law School , Cambridge, MA 
 CEO, Sinfonik Inc., New York , NY 
 Professor, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Faculty of Law , Berlin, Germany 
 William W. Cook Professor, University of Michigan Law School , Ann Arbor, MI, USA 
 Assistant Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen, School of Management and Economics , Shenzhen, PRC 
 Director, Ashoka University, Centre for Social and Behaviour Change , Sonipat, India 
 Professor, Universität Mannheim, Department of Law, Mannheim , Germany 
 CEO, Sinfonik Inc. , New York, NY, USA 
Pages
110-126
Publication year
2021
Publication date
2021
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISSN
21617201
e-ISSN
19465319
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3170490253
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.