Courts After Conflict

DateMay 9, 2014

Time7:00am to 8:30am

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

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Can legal institutions maintain impartiality in the face of violent ethnic conflict? Can a steep decline in the intensity of violence help restore impartiality to ethnically biased courts? How persistent are the effects of violence? Given the ubiquity of ethnic conflicts in the past half century, understanding the institutional and cultural legacies of conflict seems vital. This paper studies ethnic bias in the legal system using decisions made by Arab and Jewish judges in Israeli courts. Data on conflict-related fatalities allow us to relate the extent of the bias to the court’s and the judge’s history of exposure to ethnic violence. In Shayo and Zussman (2011) we found that during the conflict of 2000–2004 (the Second Palestinian Intifada) judges exhibited a significant degree of ethnic ingroup bias which was strongly associated with the recent intensity of violence around the court. The present paper asks whether the drop in violence in subsequent years (2007–2010) was accompanied by attenuation in ethnic bias. We find no evidence of such attenuation at the country level. Judicial bias remains positively associated with past exposure to violence, but the association weakens over time and courts seem to converge toward a relatively high level of bias. To the extent that we see a persistent local effect of exposure to violence, it operates at the institutional (court) level rather than at the individual (judge) level.

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