Since you study this stuff, do you mind sharing a description of the kinds of situations in which the 'sharp appearance' or related type of tactic has a negative effect?
Re: David Boies (who is a prominent Manhattan attorney):
> Part of the David Boies legend is his rejection of high fashion. He’s a millionaire many times over, and many aspects of his lifestyle reflect what I’m guessing is a nine-figure net worth — his primary residence, an 8,000-square-foot mansion on almost 10 acres; an $8 million pied-à-terre here in New York City, at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel; and a racing yacht, because you’re nobody until you have a yacht. But his wealth doesn’t go into his wardrobe. He eschews Prada and Patek Philippe in favor of navy blue suits from Sears or Lands’ End, inexpensive plastic wristwatches (worn over his sleeve), and what look like black sneakers (but are actually walking shoes by Merrell).
People who think that a little bit off. The point of fashion is so people don't mistake you for being a little lower status than you are. So high status people can afford to wear clothes with holes in them, because nobody is going to mistake them for people who are poor (royalty can wear what they want, Queen Elizabeth looks like she just picks a colour to me). That can't be imitated by ordinary people, because they would just look poor.
Also, fashion isn't for strangers. I mean, I don't know anything about what is fashionable. Nearly nothing at all. So obviously stranger can't impress me with expensive clothes because I can't detect it. The situation is similar with most fashions which are signals for inside an in crowd.
It is like a developer putting "Haskell" or "Scheme" on a resume. The goal isn't to impress randoms in HR who don't know what a Haskell is and are suspicious of scheming programmers. It is to signal within a group of semi-peers who don't specifically know who you are.
But they can sure as hell read subtle social cues that occur between the lawyers and the judge. I'd reason that those cues have an outsized impact on how the jury rules.
After he was Bill Clinton's attorney in televised impeachment hearings? You have to remember that the jurors' office casts a wide net. With the worst will in the world, the attorneys can't strike everyone who has heard of someone.
I mean... David Boies is a pretty famous lawyer! There is likely a huge amount of people who recognize the name, even if they don't know anything about the person. The guy has been on cover of magazines!
Maybe _everyone_ on a jury is filtered out to only take people completely disconnected from society but.... probably not.
(case in point: many people on this website are not in legal professions yet recognize the name)
talk about disconnected from society. a lot of people have seen him on a magazine or heard the name on the news. along with about 20 other names. every day. for decades. and the name is forgotten an hour later, with a thousand other names.
as far as your point, the 1% of people here reading recognized the name. didn't know why, then googled and remembered. the jury is not here. it's '12 random people from the dmv,' and they don't recognize it, nor will they care to google it. they don't even know who steve jobs is, and won't google it on their iphone.
Defense attorneys usually put on a show to relate to you in some way. The prosecution usually looks like undertakers and usually appeal to the institution of justice, sacred duty as a citizen, etc.
Just guessing, but in some places there used to be automatic exemptions and substantially fewer people were eligible to be called so they had to serve more.
Reforms expanded the pool, for instance in NY.
From a 1996 NY Times article:
"As of Jan. 1, all 27 former exemptions and disqualifications for jury duty in New York State have been repealed"
"...as many as one-third of Long Island's residents have been exempt from jury duty because of their white-collar professions, particularly doctors, dentists and lawyers"
I live in New York, which has no exemptions. I suspect that having a last name early in the alphabet has some significance in my county as well, I’m called about every 4.5 years, starting the week after my 18th birthday. I’ve been selected about half of the time.
Also, I’m fortunate to have a job where there is no financial penalty for service, I find it interesting, and I’m not comfortable hamming up some nonsense to avoid it. I’m always surprised I’m picked because of my job (lawyers don’t like engineers on juries), and I am friends or relatives with a bunch of attorneys and policemen.
Engineers have an often-times pedantic fascination with debugging deeply detailed problems.
Consider a legal trial to be a giant machine executing a huge set of detailed and arcane and sometimes arbitrary instructions. Either the machine does the right thing (one side arguing there was no crime) or the wrong thing (the other side arguing there was a crime). What engineer doesn't love figuring out why the machine's behaviour is correct or incorrect?
I'm pretty sure that this is a bit of a myth, mostly repeated by engineers who want to feel important and superior to lawyers, who are often hotter, richer, and higher-status.
Trial lawyers present a narrative to the jury, and thus prefer jurors who are more likely to believe the presented narrative. Your typical engineer believes themselves to be capable of discerning truth independent of expert opinion. This could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on how the trial lawyer plans to present their narrative.
To expand on this, the engineering type is going to work their way through problems and situations systematically. More likely to try to dissect and analyze what they're being presented.
That's not universal -- two of the most religious people I've met were some flavor of engineer; they never bother to challenge their own biases -- but in aggregate they're a riskier jury pick than a teamster or housewife or cashier.
I feel like humans are good in identifying privileged person and would like to think them different. If someone is dressing up perfectly but it is clear that the person is not rich/confident it will have negative effect than them dressing moderately. Some non rich born people are able to get in high societies but for most of us, it will be how you are born and raised.
Much of what attorneys do is for their client(s): win or lose, the client pays the bills. One of the attorneys I work against is extremely loud in court but seldom wins. Even so, all their clients love them, despite the fact that they are incompetent as a trial attorney. Because they present themselves as the belligerent television attorney that does always win, every time the lose they can just blame the court for getting it wrong. People are easily fooled.
Law is as much about settling grievances, taking moral stands, and slinging "fuck you's" as much as it is about actual damages and money.
Even if loud, angry lawyer guy doesn't win, dragging them to court and making them pay for a lawyer -- and then slinging vitriol at them in court -- has more emotional satisfaction than a dispassionate, slow, boring, go-nowhere hearing that ends with a moderate settlement.
(note: in some places the loser pays all of the fees for the winner, so locality matters here)
Oh for sure. I consider myself lucky to be a salaried attorney with one government agency as a client since I don’t have to sing and dance to impress people. I can just do good work and achieve consistent results and everyone is happy. Really, what my comment should have said, is that much of what attorneys do is done to impress their clients and has very little to do with actually litigating whatever the issues are in a case.
A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using rules to enforce a social order, the legal system has no relationship with justice if this is acceptable.
To put it the most callous way I can, that's not very baseyian of you.
How someone looks informs your prior probability of who they are. What they say informs your posterior probability, but you gotta take that prior into account when forming the posterior. At least, if you want 'accurate' statistics.
(Bias - variance trade-off not withstanding, nor second-order effects of doing the 'correct' thing being possibly more detrimental than the advantage given by the 'correct' thing)
But how strong is the effect? It's not just a binary judgement. People can heavily bias based on features that are borderline irrelevant. Also, you may end up hurting a lot of innocent people by generalizing too much based on some feature that is not causally associated with the actual crime, even if it predicts well overall.
Are you comfortable applying this same bayesian logic to other factors like race?
There are 2 separate issues. Firstly, are people correctly estimating their priors, or are their priors unfounded.
Secondly, and more importantly I think, what effects does a 'correct' bias have when it starts interacting with other people. It might be the optimal choice in isolation. But that doesn't make it a good idea game-theoretically if everyone starts doing it.
The end result can be difficult to explain though. Because it means that not taking certain useful information into account leads to better decisions.
I think that, sometimes, we argue that a systemic bias is stronger than the statistics warrant. When sometimes the argument should be that sysyemic bias, statistically warranted or not is harmful.
(Note, my original comment was me making the mistake I argue against in this post)
>>A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using rules to enforce a social order, the legal system has no relationship with justice if this is acceptable.
Should is they keyword and maybe one day we'll reach that point. Meanwhile, looks and appearance can make a huge difference, so why take the chance?
I agree, it's should. I am not saying take a chance but let's emphasize should, the way things are is wrong, period. Not worse, but wrong and incorrect and it should not be tolerated much like racism and msiogyny shouldn't have been tolerated in the past.
Yes, same thing with racial disparities. Something needs to be done about both issues, perhaps technology can help by using deepfake audio/video to repeat what the defendant is saying and avoid judge/jury/prosecutor visual contact.
B) Dressing to the nines can work against you as a lawyer or litigant
Source: I study jurors and coach trial lawyers for a living, among other things.