There’s no evidence climate change has destroyed the promise of a fair trial
It’s a scorcher outside. Sure, you’ve got air conditioning at home and in the office, but no one can stay inside forever. Eventually you’ll have to face the heat. Can the very concept of justice survive such a situation?Article content
The economists used the binary nature of final decisions on asylum claims in U.S. immigration courts to test their hypothesis that external environmental conditions impact indoor work. Their data included 207,000 yea or nay verdicts delivered between 2000 and 2004 in 43 cities across the U.S., matched to nearby outside temperatures. It bears mention that every courtroom in question was air-conditioned to federal government standards.
To explain this surprising outcome they suggested, “High temperatures may stimulate temper, irritability … and other emotions that might induce a judge to be less well-disposed toward a typical applicant.” Even more surprising, female judges were found to be significantly more susceptible to this effect. These results were backed by reams of convincing statistical work.
In an American Economic Association podcast, Heyes broadened his findings to cover a much wider range of occupations: “If the performance of a judge is compromised, then equally perhaps all of those other high-skilled people working every day in millions of offices around the world — teachers or accountants or surgeons … their performance could be comprised.” As temperatures rise outside offices around the world, it seems every profession will slowly become more crotchety and less reliable.