Measuring Gender and Religious Bias in the Indian Judiciary
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Abstract
We study judicial in-group bias in Indian criminal courts, collecting data onover 80 million legal case records from 2010–2018. We exploit quasi-random assignment of judges and changes in judge cohorts to examine whether defendant outcomes are affected by being assigned to a judge with a similar religious or gender identity. We estimate tight zero effects of in-group bias. The upper end of our 95% confidence interval rejects effect sizes that are one-fifth of those in most of the prior literature.Keywords
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