The science of justice经济学人

Science and Technolgy

科技

The science of justice

司法的学问

I think it's time we broke for lunch…

该吃午餐了

Court rulings depend partly on when the judge last had a snack

法庭判决结果一定程度上取决于法官上一次吃点心的时间

AROUND the world, courthouses are adorned with a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales and a sword: Justice personified. Her sword stands for the power of the court, her scales for the competing claims of the petitioners. The blindfold (a 15th-century innovation) represents the principle that justice should be blind. The law should be applied without fear or favour, with only cold reason and the facts of the case determining what happens to the accused.

世界各地的法院都装饰有一尊女子的雕像，这个女人被蒙住双眼，手持一架天平和一把剑。她是正义的化身。剑代表着法庭的权力，而天平代表着上诉人的竞争性权利主张。眼罩（是15世纪的一项革新）代表着司法的盲目性原则。也就是说应用法律应该毫无畏惧和偏袒之心，只有冷静的推理和案件事实才能决定如何处理被告。

Lawyers, though, have long suspected that such lofty ideals are not always achieved in practice, even in well run judicial systems free from political meddling. Justice, say the cynics, is what the judge had for breakfast. Now they have proof. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes how Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his colleagues followed eight Israeli judges for ten months as they ruled on over 1,000 applications made by prisoners to parole boards. The plaintiffs were asking either to be allowed out on parole or to have the conditions of their incarceration changed.

然而，律师们一直以来都怀疑在实践中这种崇高的理想是否总能实现，就连在那些不受政治干涉、运转良好的司法体系里都是如此。犬儒主义者说：司法就是法官的早餐。而且现在他们有了证据。美国国家科学院学报一篇文章描述了内盖夫(西南亚巴勒斯坦南部地区)本-古里安大学的舍夷?丹齐格和他的几个同事追踪8位以色列法官10个月的事情，在这10个月里法官们裁判了囚犯向假释裁决委员会提出的1000多分申请。申请人要么请求准许假释要么请求改善狱中居住条件。

The team found that, at the start of the day, the judges granted around two-thirds of the applications before them. As the hours passed, that number fell sharply (see chart), eventually reaching zero. But clemency returned after each of two daily breaks, during which the judges retired for food. The approval rate shot back up to near its original value, before falling again as the day wore on.

调查小队发现，早晨法官所阅申请的约2/3得到了批准。而随着中午的临近，批准的数量急剧减少（如图所示），最终接近于0。但是在每天的两餐休息时间过后，仁慈又重新降临。批准率回到了接近于早晨的水平，并随着时间的消逝再次下跌。

To be sure, mealtimes were not the only thing that predicted the outcome of the rulings. Offenders who appeared prone to recidivism (in this case those with previous convictions) were more likely to be turned down, as were those who were not in a rehabilitation programme. Happily, neither the sex nor the ethnicity of the prisoners seemed to matter to