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U.S. courts rely predominately on judicial self-recusal and incourt disclosure to address judicial conflicts of interest and maintain a critical perception of impartiality. But these approaches fail to account for the legal, institutional, and social dynamics that surround the relationship between judges, attorneys, and the adjudicative process. In reality, judges rarely use their discretion to disclose conflicts or recuse themselves, and attorneys do not ask them to do so. If we understand both the legal and extralegal incentives at play in these decisions, none of these outcomes should be surprising. The shortcomings of recusal and disclosure rules are particularly salient in the context of judicial campaign finance, where elected judges face the acute dilemma of being assigned to a case in which one of the parties or attorneys has made financial contributions to the judge's election campaign. To support these substantive claims, this Article features the results of a novel randomized field experiment--the first-ever blinded experiment conducted on judges in active cases. In the experiment, Wisconsin and Texas civil cases that feature donor attorneys are identified and a portion of the judges presiding over these cases are randomly assigned to receive a letter identifying the potential conflict and requesting recusal. Judicial and attorney behavior is then tracked over the life of the case to observe how often judges recuse, whether they disclose the conflict, how attorneys respond to those disclosures, and whether the intervention of a third party has any effect on these decisions. The experimental results provide much-needed empirical confirmation of growing skepticism surrounding judicial recusal and raise serious doubts that the most popular solution to the recusal problem--increased judicial disclosure--will do much to help at all. Building on these findings, I explore procedural and institutional alternatives that better account for the realities of judicial conflicts of interest and the incentives of court actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, support for criminal justice reform in the United States has become a groundswell, with reformers demanding an end to racial and socioeconomic disparities in all aspects of policing, prosecution, adjudication, and incarceration. While high-profile cases of police misconduct during arrest remain in the limelight, a growing and politically diverse chorus of voices is calling jor change at the first point of contact between a defendant and the court system: the bail hearing. Bail decisions are highly consequential in terms of their scale and impact on the lives of defendants, their.families, and the community. Yet, to date we only have incomplete evidence of disparities in bail decisions and their consequences. Without an adequate empirical picture of how bail decisions are actually made-and how state and local regimes differ in structure and constituency-even sincere efforts at change will likely be short-lived and unsuccess. Critically, we do not know enough about how judges evaluate whether to release a defendant prior to trial, and we have little reliable information about how the decisions made regarding pretrial release atlkct case outcomes and the long-term behavior of the defendants. The little data we have is either taken exclusively from or skewed heavily toward large urban areas. Without more comprehensive accounts to undergird reform, even sincere effors at change are unlikely to yield lasting success. This Article helps to fill this gap through an empirical analysis of more than 23,000 misdemeanor bail decisions from a mixed rural and suburban county in Arizona. Compared to the results of recent studies in large metropolitan cities, our findings are striking. We show that despite having virtually identical caseloads, the most "lenient"judges assign money bail in only 20% of their cases with average bail amounts ofonly $200, whereas the "strictest" judges assign money bail in nearly 60% ofcases at an average of $2,500 per bail assignment (three and thirteen times higher, respectively). This variability has a racial component as well, with some.judges as much as 12 percentage points more likely to assign money bail to Black defendants in comparison to theirwhite counterparts. And theimpacts ofthese disparities are not limited to the outcome of bail hearings: Downstream analysis shows that these judicial disparities have effects on the liture behavior of defendants. Taken together, ourfindings suggest thattbr bail reform to be something more than merely cosmetic, reformers must take aim at high levels of.judicial disparity. At the same time, reformers should be wary of one-sizefits-all policy prescriptions that purport to provide unilateral remedies to all of the country's multifirious bail problems, instead recognizing that the specific relationships between courts and institutions, criminal defendants, and the broader community likely depend on the underlying characteristics of those systems and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing literature challenging the general assumption of and reliance on random judicial assignment by identifying common court procedures and practices that threaten unbiased causal inference. These "de‐randomizing" events, which include differing probabilities of assignment, post‐assignment judicial changes, nonrandom missingness, and nonrandom assignment itself, should be accounted for when making causal claims but are commonly either ignored or not even recognized by researchers utilizing random judicial assignment. The article explores how these de‐randomizing events violate the key empirical assumptions underlying randomized studies and offers methodological solutions. It also presents original data from a survey of the 30 largest U.S. state‐level criminal courts, outlining their assignment protocols and identifying the extent to which they feature the de‐randomizing events described in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]