The Effect of Lawyers’ Relative Voice Pitch during Oral Arguments of the Supreme Court

• In Event: The Dynamics of Oral Arguments

Brief Overview

The extant literature portrays the Supreme Court judges as hyperrational automatons. Analyzing thousands of oral argument recordings, we find that the male attorneys with a lower-pitched voice are more likely to win the votes of individual justices.

Authors

• Yiqiang Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Siyu Li, University of Minnesota