Kaleigh Ruiz

JD, PhD Candidate

Gender, Collaboration, and Compromise on the Courts


Using a dataset of about 9,000 cases over the past 23 years, I seek to understand whether women judges facilitate compromise on an already collegial court. I theorize that women who are designated as majority authors will reduce the presence and severity of separate opinions in a given case, and that women who are not majority authors will be less likely to write a separate opinion as compared to their male peers.

This project is still in preliminary stages.