Alumni relationships and judicial bias

Abstract

We examine whether law school alumni relationships between lawyers and judges are correlated with case outcomes. We show that, in the context of medical malpractice lawsuits filed in Florida, having a plaintiff's attorney who attended the same law school as a randomly assigned judge increases the chances of recovery by about 2 percentage points. We further show that the effect is more pronounced between lawyers and judges with a larger age gap, consistent with an age‐dependent effect. Our results suggest that case outcomes can be biased when lawyers and judges are part of the same affinity group.