Judges rarely reveal their real reasoning in their opinions when they are influenced by factors that they know they should not consider. The natural next question is how, when a judge is improperly influenced, he or she reasons to justify a biased decision. In a set of experiments using incumbent Chinese judges, we first replicated the findings of previous studies that showed judges can be influenced by extra-legal factors. More importantly, we showed that judges may employ a range of legal techniques to rationalize decision biases: they interpret legal standards and legal concepts strategically, finesse the applicability of law, infer or deny causation and foreseeability, and draw different conclusions from facts. Our findings provide a more realistic understanding of how judges behave, and cast doubt on reasoned elaboration as a guarantee of judicial transparency and trustworthiness.
CITATION STYLE
Liu, J. Z., & Li, X. (2019). Legal Techniques for Rationalizing Biased Judicial Decisions: Evidence from Experiments with Real Judges. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16(3), 630–670. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12229
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