“Let Me Just Interrupt You”: Estimating Gender Effects in Supreme Court Oral Arguments

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet what if some advocates are treated differently before the Court solely because of aspects of their identity? In this work, we leverage a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates at both the Court-level and the justice-level. Examining nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect that dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates.