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Justices act differently for women
The Deseret News – by Jamshid Ghazi Askar, Deseret News – Four rigorous academic articles later, a couple of BYU researchers are bona fide experts on Supreme Court oral arguments. Since 2010 communications professor Ed Carter and former graduate student James Phillips have teamed up on four published or soon-to-be-published articles in law reviews and journals about various aspects of the high court’s oral arguments. In their latest installment, an article that will soon appear in the Rutgers Law Review, they determined that gender indelibly influences how the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court treat the attorneys who appear before the high court. For purposes of the Rutgers study Carter and Phillips labeled eight Supreme Court justices as “liberal” or “conservative.” (Justice Clarence Thomas was excluded from the research because the last time he asked a question during oral arguments was Feb. 22, 2006.) After parsing through 57 oral arguments from 2004-09, they determined that liberal justices tend to ask more questions if interacting with a female attorney, while conservative jurists talk more than usual when addressing women lawyers. [Full story at: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700145109/Justices-act-differently-for-women.html ]