Women Judges

Here's an interesting post on why women judges, who apparently do worse than men by most academic measures, actually turn out to to be decent judges (at least by some measures). The three proposed explanations for this apparent paradox are:

1) women are, innately or by virtue of their experience, better judgers than men, 2) that the legal hierarchy's traditional measures of success don't work, or 3) that the study's empirics are off because it's not measuring judicial quality correctly.

Here's my theory/fourth option: being a judge is such an easy job that anyone of average legal competence can do it. In contrast, developing a case is hard work. The lawyers litigating the case have to develop the right facts and good legal arguments. But once the case is before a judge, all the judge has to do is select the correct legal theory to decide the case, which more likely than not, has been extensively briefed by the lawyers. Recognizing the strongest argument is way easier than actually thinking up an argument. Then the judge writes an opinion, rewording and essentially plagerizing the selected argument the prevailing party's lawyer made. Should the correct argument not be before the judge, or should it be hard to spot, the judge can rely upon his or her clerks to do research and/or spot the correct argument.