Measuring Gender and Religious Bias in the Indian Judiciary

Abstract

We study judicial in-group bias in Indian criminal courts, collecting data on over 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.

JEL codes

Reference

Elliott Ash, Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Sandeep Bhupatiraju, Daniel L. Chen, Tatanya Devi, Christoph Goessmann, Paul Novosad, and Bilal Siddiqi, “Measuring Gender and Religious Bias in the Indian Judiciary”, TSE Working Paper, n. 22-1395, December 2022.