By Michael Hotchkiss, Office of Communications

Adding a black judge to an appel­late panel with two non­black judges nearly ensures the panel will vote in favor of an affir­ma­tive action pro­gram, accord­ing to research by Jonathan Kastel­lec, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at Prince­ton, who has eval­u­ated the con­se­quences of judi­cial diver­sity on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

While Kastellec’s research also shows that black judges are sig­nif­i­cantly more likely to sup­port affir­ma­tive action pro­grams, the small per­cent­age of racial minori­ties on the fed­eral bench means the key ques­tion is whether their pres­ence on appel­late courts influ­ences their col­leagues and affects case outcomes.

The results have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for assess­ing the rela­tion­ship between diver­sity and rep­re­sen­ta­tion on fed­eral courts.

Kastel­lec, J. P. (2013), Racial Diver­sity and Judi­cial Influ­ence on Appel­late Courts. Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, 57: 167–183. doi: 10.1111/j.1540–5907.2012.00618.x

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