Shared History and Imbalance in the Courts: A Social Networks Approach

• In Event: Court Communities and Work Group Dynamics

Abstract

Recent work has shown that shared history among courtroom actors (i.e., judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney) is predictive of case outcomes, but how does shared history vary by actor type and actor pair? What happens to the defendant when there is an imbalance in the shared history among court actors? This study brings the court communities perspective by Eisenstein et al. into the 21st century by using a social networks approach to test old concepts in new ways, develop new hypotheses, and visualize the data. The data are 10 years of all criminal cases in Pennsylvania in 11 counties. Results include tests of the court communities hypotheses, Simmel’s hypotheses, and more recent findings in the criminological literature.

Author

• Robert Hutchison, Measures for Justice