Some early thoughts about gendered realities in the Kent case

We will return to our discussion of the sentencing of former federal district judge Samuel Kent in class this week, and everyone should be sure to review again all the key case documents (here and here) and your own proposed pre-guideline and guideline sentence for defendant Kent. 

You should recall that, in our discussion just before break, students proposed a prison sentence as low as six months and as high as 15 years for defendant Kent.  Though I did not make much of the fact before, I do not think it was mere coincidence that a male "judge" proposed the lowest sentence for Kent and that a female "judge" proposed the highest sentence for Kent. As I have noted before and will note again and again, gendered realities (both conscious and unconscious) clearly play a significant role in how sex offense cases are handled.

Some of you have at times expressed concern about how often I tend to bring gendered perspectives into our class discussions.  To help you understand why I often obsess over gendered realities in law and practice, consider this new research I just came across.  The article, which is titled "From Lawyer to Judge: Advancement, Sex, and Name-Calling," has nothing to do with sentencing, but it does provide some worrisome insights into how lawyers judge one another.  Here is the abstract:

This paper provides the first empirical test of the Portia Hypothesis: females with masculine monikers are more successful in legal careers. Utilizing South Carolina microdata, we look for correlation between an individual's advancement to a judgeship and his/her name's masculinity, which we construct from the joint empirical distribution of names and gender in the state's entire population of registered voters. We find robust evidence that nominally masculine females are favored over other females. Hence, our results support the Portia Hypothesis.