Shay O’Brien
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shayobrien.bsky.social
Shay O’Brien
@shayobrien.bsky.social
890 followers 970 following 41 posts
Sociologist and Stone Program Postdoc at Harvard studying elite kinship networks (she/her)
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shayobrien.bsky.social
I looked at the citation counts for court cases and found that upper class disputes have shaped case law wayyy more than other disputes - yet another way our legal system gets continually distorted by the concerns of the rich and powerful.
This horizontal lollipop chart shows the number of citations for all the court cases in Dallas from 1895-1945 that made it to more than one round of trial. The Y axis has a line for each case, and the X axis has the number of citations as of April 2025. The cases from upper-class families are represented by white triangles, and the cases from all other families are represented by gray circles. It is clear visually that the upper-class cases have been cited much more often over the past century, on average and in total.
July 23, 2025 at 2:56 PM