Gender Matters in the Judiciary: Adjudicating Sexual Assault in Korea

• In Event: Gender and Judging: Court Decision-Making in New Contexts

Abstract

My dissertation contributes new theoretical perspectives on gender and judging through an exploration of how different gender compositions of three-judge panels influence criminal sentencing decisions regarding rape in South Korea—a civil law country characterized by hierarchical judicial organization, absence of jury trials, and high gender inequality. While the effect of a judge’s gender on case outcomes has been long studied, the scholarship is focused predominantly on common law judiciaries and the findings are mixed. There is limited knowledge and understanding of how judges in civil law countries make decisions around rape cases as a collegial panel. Moreover, the lack of qualitative data on contemporary judicial decision-making behavior has hampered our ability to more completely understand the factors driving their decisions besides laws and political ideology. Using mixed methods, including logistic regression, content analysis of judicial opinions from 2014 to 2020 in eight district courts, and semi-structured interviews with 42 legal elites, I analyze if and how judges across gender, gender norms and relative rank perceive rape, interpret the criminal law, determine and reason about sentencing, and influence each other on a collegial panel.

Author

• Seo Nyeong Jo, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities