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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/221294
The effect of judges' gender on decisions regarding intimate-partner violence
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This article aims at disentangling the effect of judges’ gender, experience, and caseload in
the assignment of restraining orders in IPV cases. Previous literature has independently
looked at the effect of gender on judicial decisions and found that it becomes relevant in
gender-related cases. However, we find that such effects are better understood in interaction with other contextual factors such as the experience of judges and the amount of
work they face, because these determine the levels of uncertainty and information costs
surrounding decisions. For our empirical analysis, we use data from on-duty pretrial
court decisions on restraining orders in Spain between 2010 and 2018. We find conditional effects of gender depending on experience and workload: more experienced female
judges are more likely to grant protection orders than their male counterparts when the
amount of caseload is high. These findings are relevant to understand the mechanisms
behind judicial inequality under civil law systems, where judges’ attributes tend to be
unobservable by institutional design.
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VALLBÉ, Joan Josep and RAMÍREZ-FOLCH, C. The effect of judges' gender on decisions regarding intimate-partner violence. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. 2023. Vol. 20, num. 3, pags. 641-668. ISSN 1740-1453. [consulted: 5 of October of 2026]. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/221294