By: James G. Apple, Editor-in-Chief, International
Judicial Monitor and President, International Judicial Academy
During the decade of the 90s there were two
occasions when I was traveling in the Middle East. My itinerary in both of them
included a visit to Egypt, visiting the courts in Cairo and talking to judges
there. On one of those occasions I asked one of my judicial hosts about the
absence of women as judges in Egypt. He admitted that there were no female
judges in his country. I asked him why. He replied that women judges would be too
lenient in judging and sentencing persons accused of crimes. In other words, to
use the phrase common in U.S. legal circles, women judges, according to my
host, would be “soft on crime.”
Years later, the International Judicial Academy
was conducting a seminar for U.S. judges in The Hague and Paris. Our visit to
the City of Light included a stop at the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la
Cite. We stopped in one of the courtrooms in the Palais to observe a trial
conducted under the French legal system. When we entered the courtroom I noted
that the case was being heard by three judges, all female. This situation
triggered an inquiry based on my experience in Egypt several years earlier. I
inquired of my host about the French experience with women judges, especially
as that experience related to the conduct and outcome of criminal cases. Were
women judges in fact easier on persons accused of crimes, I inquired of my
host, a French judge who worked at a legal research institute in Paris. “No,”
he replied, “it is just the opposite. Women judges are much harder on persons
accused and convicted of crimes, and give out much more hard sentences than
men judges.”
The point of these two anecdotes is obviously to
demonstrate the huge difference between belief and reality with respect to
women in the judiciary, and to falsify at least one argument often raised
against the whole idea of women judges, or raised at least to restrict their
numbers in a particular legal system. There are undoubtedly other “myths” that
are used by those opposed to female judges.
I first became aware of the broad issue of women
in the judiciary when I was still employed as a senior staff officer at the
Federal Judicial Center in Washington in the decade of the 90s. The occasion
for inquiry was a short research project relating to the makeup of judges in
the federal courts in the United States. I came across one table which revealed
that women in the federal courts constituted about 10-12% of the total number
of federal judges in the United States. The number of women judges in the state
courts was higher, but not by much.
I recently reviewed some current statistical
studies about women in the judiciary in the U.S. and found that the situation
has improved significantly in the last decade. In a statistical study published
in February of this year by the Commission on Women in the Profession of the
American Bar Association, of the total number of all federal judges in the
United States (1,874), including Supreme Court justices, circuit court of
appeals judges, district court judges, bankruptcy judges and magistrate
(assistant) judges, 24.1% are women. In the Supreme Court of the United States,
with three justices, 33.3 % are women while in the circuit courts of appeals,
30.9% of the judges are women,. In the U.S. district courts (trial courts)
approximately 30% are women.
In the state courts, the situation is comparable.
Among all state courts, trial and appellate, 27% are women. In the highest
courts and intermediate courts of appeal in the states, the percentage of women
judges is 32% in each category. In the general jurisdiction trial courts
(circuit or superior courts), the percentage of women judges is 25%, and in the
lower, limited jurisdiction courts (district courts) 31% of the judges are
female.
The situation of women in the federal judiciary
has vastly improved in the past five years as a result of appointments by
President Barack Obama. Of the 217 judicial appointments he has made since
taking office, 40% (87) have been women. And while such improvement is to be
applauded, there are pockets among the federal court systems where there are
either no women judges or a very small number that does not amount to adequate
representation. For instance the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth
Circuit has only one woman judge among the ten active judges on that court. And
she is the only female judge ever to have sat on that court. A similar situation
exists in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. It has also been
noted that “women are vastly underrepresented on the Third Circuit (where they
make up about 15% of the judges and the Fourth Circuit (about 27%).
In both state and federal courts, women have a
27.1% representation, a significant improvement over the situation that existed
in the mid 1990s.
It should be noted that the judges themselves are
better at selecting law clerks who are women than the general populace and
politicians are in selecting female judges. Among all courts, federal and
state, the judges filled 51% of the available judicial clerkships with recent
women law graduates. In the state courts, 54.8% of the law clerks are female,
while 45.6% of federal judge law clerkships are filled by women.
Elsewhere in this issue of the International
Judicial Monitor there is a book review of a recently published biography
of the first woman judge in the United Kingdom, Rose Heilbron, written by her
daughter. It is a compelling story of a very talented woman lawyer who overcame
many hurdles to reach the highest ranks of barristers in the U.K., and who was
finally recognized by her appointment to the bench at age 42 in 1956. However,
a telling part of her story is that while she was the first female judge in
Britain (appointed Recorder in 1956), she was never elevated to the higher
ranks of the British judiciary, such as the Court of Appeal or the Law Lords. Instead she was shunted off to a less distinguished and prestigious Family Court
Division when she was appointed to the High Court (rather than the Queen’s
Bench or Chancery Division) where she completed her judicial tenure.
International
Judicial Monitor