Racial Bias Trends in the Text of US Legal Opinions
Rohan Jinturkar
Although there is widespread recognition of racial bias in US law, it is
unclear how such bias appears in the language of law, namely judicial opinions,
and whether it varies across time period or region. Building upon approaches
for measuring implicit racial bias in large-scale corpora, we approximate GloVe
word embeddings for over 6 million US federal and state court cases from 1860
to 2009. We find strong evidence of racial bias across nearly all regions and
time periods, as traditionally Black names are more closely associated with
pre-classified "unpleasant" terms whereas traditionally White names are more
closely associated with pre-classified "pleasant" terms. We also test whether
legal opinions before 1950 exhibit more implicit racial bias than those after
1950, as well as whether opinions from Southern states exhibit less change in
racial bias than those from Northeastern states. We do not find evidence of
elevated bias in legal opinions before 1950, or evidence that legal opinions
from Northeastern states show greater change in racial bias over time compared
to Southern states. These results motivate further research into
institutionalized racial bias.