In 2015, Harvard ran a judicial experiment. Thirty-five federal judges participated in a workshop. They were asked to review a 1990’s appellate case about Balkan war crimes. They each had one hour to decide whether to reverse the trial judge’s decision to convict the defendant.

The researchers slightly tweaked each judge’s package, in two ways. First, they varied the emotional resonance: sometimes the defendant was described as a villain, and sometimes described sympathetically, such as by saying he’d expressed “deep regret at all bloodshed in this tragic war.”

Second, the packets flipped the legal strength. Some packets included prior cases suggesting the defendant’s conviction was legally flawed, while other packets included legal precedent hinting that the conviction was valid.

The all-too-predictable result was most judges based their decisions on the bleeding-heart, emotional factors— and not the law. The legal precedents didn’t seem to matter at all. Instead, the judges’ decisions were strongly correlated with whether the defendant was shown sympathetically— even though the judges wrote that their decisions were solely based on the law.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mongoose-love-thursday-march-20-2025