Performative Judging? Measuring the Effect of Video Recording on Judicial Behavior in Circuit Court Oral Arguments

With the advent of remote-video technology and recent pushes to include video feeds in U.S. Supreme Court hearings, many are concerned about the effect that video and streaming might have on the behavior of U.S. judges and court participants. Previous research has shown that judges react to public sentiment, and anecdotal evidence suggests that introducing video recording might induce greater levels of “performative judging,” where behavior changes when there are cameras in the courtroom. We use AI-powered diarization to analyze the transcripts of oral arguments, leveraging the quasi-random adoption of video feeds in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. We find suggestive evidence that judges speak more and are more likely to interrupt attorneys when proceedings are video recorded rather than only audio recorded. However, these results are mixed and model dependent. When our estimation strategies account for interactive effects or include only judges that spoke in both audio-only and video hearings, we observe a camera effect for some outcomes of interest. By contrast, non-interactive models that include all judges result in null findings. These mixed findings provide novel but preliminary evidence exploring the performative judging hypothesis and suggest that courts and policy makers should consider the potential effects on judges’ behavior when deciding whether to introduce cameras into the courtroom.