MEMORANDUM

**TO: **Justice Clarence Thomas

**FROM: **Mandlenkosi Sibanda

**CC: **Wendy Long (clerk )

**DATE: **April 19, 2018

**SUBJECT: **Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women’s Issues?

Summary

This memorandum serves as a follow-up and support to the paper published by Glynn and Sen, (2014) titled Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women’s Issues?. After replicating their analysis and running matching algorithms, I can firmly attest to the validity of their study.

Randomization

Glynn and Sen, (2014) argue that their data qualifies the criteria of a natural quasi-experiment because when a family decides to have a child, the sex of the child is outside the parent’s control. This means that their data is free from other individual characteristics like partisanship or ideology (Glynn and Sen, 2014). And because of that, the relationship established between being a judge and having a male or female child is exogenously, and also allows Glynn and Sen, (2014) “to quantify the causal effect of a personal relationship on decision making.” If the units are appropriately randomized as they claim, we would expect to see a similar distribution across all observed and unobserved covariates for both the treatment and control units. We can check this by plotting a histogram for any covariate for both the control and treatment group. For the covariates girls and child, their corresponding graphs are shown below in figure 1.

Figure 1: Histograms for child and girls covariates, for both treatment and control group

Code used

Figure 1 demonstrates the similarity of the distributions and therefore proves the randomness assumed by Glynn and Sen, (2014).

Method Replication and Analysis

Figure 2 shows the graph that Glynn and Sen, (2014) plotted to show that democrat judges voted in a more feminist manner than republican judges.

#data-science #data analysis