Hi @chanret.bsky.social! We will analyse an actual reform of the Norwegian district courts😀

The results confirm that both chief justices and female justices, when operating as the presiding justice of the panel, are significantly more likely to steer the case towards a unanimous decision as compared to their fellow justices. Legal academics had no discernible impact on consensus formation.

We hypothesize that presiding justices with certain characteristics (e.g., gender and chief justice), when in charge of the decision-making process, are more willing and better able to forge consensus.

In the article we examine the impact of the leadership of presiding justices on consensus formation on the Norwegian Supreme Court where cases are distributed randomly to two parallel decisional panels.