How Do Lay People React to Judicial Decision-Making?

A new study looks at how lay people respond to the judicial reasoning. Dan Simon & Nicholas Scurich, Lay Judgments of Judicial Decision-Making (July 18, 2011), J. Empirical Legal Stud. (forthcoming 2011), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1888630

This exploratory study examined lay people’s evaluations of judicial decision-making, specifically of the judicial decision-making process and the judiciary’s legitimacy. Seven hundred participants were presented with three judicial decisions, which were portrayed as following on the heels of solid and appropriate legal procedure.

Each decision was accompanied by one of four types of reasoning. Participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of the decisions, focusing on the manner in which they were made and the legitimacy of the decision-maker, regardless of their outcomes. The study yielded four findings.

• First, lay people’s judgments were highly contingent on the outcome of the judges’ decisions. Consistent with the theory of motivated reasoning, participants found the decisions highly acceptable when they agreed with the judges’ decision, but deemed them relatively unacceptable when they disagreed with them.
• Second, participants were indifferent to the modes of reasoning when they agreed with the outcomes of the decisions, but were differentially sensitive to the modes of reasoning when the judges’ decisions frustrated their preferred outcomes.
• Third, when participants were sensitive to the modes of reasoning, they gave higher ratings of acceptability to decisions that openly admitted to good reasons on both sides of the case as compared with decisions accompanied by reasons that supported one side of the case exclusively. Giving no reasons at all was found to be more acceptable than giving a single, curt reason.
• Fourth, the findings replicated the coherence effect. Implications for the legitimacy of the judiciary are discussed.