Barrister Gender and Litigant Success on the High Court of Australia

We examine the relationship between gender of the barrister and appeal outcomes on the High Court of Australia. We find evidence of asymmetries in that gender matters if a female barrister presents oral argument for the appellant opposed to a respondent, for which one or more male barristers present oral argument, but the reverse is not true. Specifically, we find that an appellant represented in oral argument by a female barrister, opposed to a respondent represented in oral argument by a male barrister, is less likely to receive the vote of a justice in the majority. However, we also find that the appellant disadvantage of having a female barrister present oral argument is (partially) offset in the case of liberal justices and on panels having a higher proportion of female justices. The extent to which the disadvantage is offset and potentially turns from being a disadvantage to an advantage depends on the degree to which the judge is liberal and the proportion of female justices on the panel. * Address for correspondence: Russell Smyth, Department of Economics, Monash University 3800, Australia; E-mail: [email protected]. We thank Jane Quinlan and Amanda Reed for research assistance with this project and Matthew Groves for helpful suggestions. © 2013 Vinod Mishra & Russell Smyth All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.