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

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 be- fore 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. Exam- ining 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.