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93 Tex. L. Rev. 855 (2014-2015)
Heart versus Head: Do Judges Follow the Law of Follow Their Feelings

handle is hein.journals/tlr93 and id is 907 raw text is: Heart Versus Head: Do Judges Follow the Law or Follow Their Feelings? Andrew J. Wistrich,* Jeffrey J. Rachlinski** & Chris Guthrie*** Emotion is a findamental aspect of human existence. In normal, healthy people, feelings about options exert a powerful influence on choice. Intuition and anecdote suggest that people react more positively toward others whom they like or for whom they feel sympathy than toward others whom they dislike or for whom they feel disgust. Empirical research in the field of psychology confirms that impression. Experiments also show that this effect extends to legal contexts, revealing that emotional reactions to litigants influence the decisions of mock jurors in hypothetical civil and criminal cases. This Article explores the question whether feelings about litigants also influence judges' decisions. Unlike jurors, judges are expected to put their emotional reactions to litigants aside. Can they do it? The first reported experiments on the topic using actual judges as subjects suggest that they cannot. I. IN TRO DU CTION ................................................................................... 856 II. How EMOTION CAN INFLUENCE JUDICIAL DECISION MAKING ......... 862 III. M ETHO DOLOGY .................................................................................. 874 IV . EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS .............................................................. 876 A . Illegal Im m igration ................................................................. 876 B . M edical M arijuana .................................................................. 880 C . Strip Search ............................................................................. 883 D . C redit C ard D ebt ..................................................................... 887 E . N arcotics Search ..................................................................... 890 F. Environm ental Pollution ......................................................... 893 V . D ISCU SSIO N ........................................................................................ 898 A . Sum m ary ................................................................................. 898 B . L im itations .............................................................................. 900 C . Im plications ............................................................................ 905 1. F or Lawyers ...................................................................... 905 2. For the Justice System ....................................................... 906 3. F or Judges ......................................................................... 909 V I. C ON CLU SION ...................................................................................... 9 11 * Magistrate Judge, United States District Court, Central District of California. ** Henry Allen Mark Professor, Cornell University Law School. *** Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor, Vanderbilt University Law School. The authors thank Jennifer Park Chang for her excellent research.