Attempts to Influence Judges

Abstract

While on the faculty of the Harvard Law School almost 100 years ago, Roscoe Pound (1912) wrote that judges are influenced by, and must take account of, the world around them. They can be influenced in at least three respects—in what decisions they make, in why they make them, and in the sources they use to justify the decisions. For example, in declaring racial segregation in the public schools to be illegal in 1954, Earl Warren and the other Supreme Court justices knew that their decision would be quite unpopular in parts of the country. In their effort to give every support and justification for the legitimacy of their action, they were willing to include in their decision a footnote citing contemporary psychological research that concluded that segregation diminished the self-esteem of Black children (see Chapter 6). Whether the psychological research that they cited was truly a reason for their decision is debatable.