Racial bias in legal language

• Main Authors: Douglas Rice, Jesse H. Rhodes, Tatishe Nteta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2019-05-01
• Series: Research & Politics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019848930

Although racial bias in the law is widely recognized, it remains unclear how these biases are in entrenched in the language of the law, judicial opinions. In this article, we build on recent research introducing an approach to measuring the presence of implicit racial bias in large-scale corpora. Utilizing an original dataset of more than one million appellate court opinions from US state and federal courts, we estimate word embeddings for the more than 400,000 most common words found in legal opinions. In a series of analyses, we find strong and consistent evidence of implicit racial bias, as African-American names are more frequently associated with unpleasant or negative concepts, whereas European-American names are more frequently associated with pleasant or positive concepts. The results have stark implications for work on the neutrality of the legal system as well as for our understanding of the entrenchment of bias through the law.