Questions about whether justice is, indeed, blind, persist. One particular question, whether judges treat litigants differently based on ethnicity, continues to receive attention in the United States as well as Europe.
In a recent contribution to this literature, Do German Judges Treat People With Foreign Names Differently? A Vignette Experiment, the authors, Alexander Morell (Goethe Univ.-Frankfurt) and Aileen Oeberst (Indep.), report experimental findings drawn from 282 sitting German judges designed to assess whether "German judges evaluate a case differently when the defendant bears a Turkish rather than a German name." To do so, the authors executed a preregistered vignette experiment in a 2 × 2 between-subject design featuring two experimental factors: the defendant’s name (Turkish versus German) and the consistency of the witness testimony.
While the study’s main results reassure as they “show little evidence of average differential treatment by defendant name across most outcomes,” one of the study’s robustness checks finds “an interaction between the consistency of the evidence and the effect of a Turkish name." An excerpted abstract follows.
"In a realistic survey experiment with a 2x2 factorial design we submit a hypothetical but realistic assault case to 282 sitting German judges and ask whether they would open trial against the suspect (a formal procedural step in German criminal proceedings). We vary the name of the accused (Turkish vs. German) and the consistency of the evidence (consistent vs. inconsistent) independently and compare the decisions as well as some preliminary assessments of these decisions between treatments. We find neither a statistically significant effect of name on the decision to open trial nor on any of the preliminary assessments. We do find, however, a strong and significant effect of the consistency of the evidence on the decision and the assessment of the probability of the suspect’s guilt. … Exploring the data further, we see that judges err more often to the detriment of the accused if the accused has a Turkish name. Judges with professional experience relevant to the specific case in question are less affected by the name while mere length of tenure seems not to help insulating judges from influence of the suspect’s name.”