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Judicial independence and lynching in historical context: an analysis of US States

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Abstract

An independent judiciary is a centrally important economic institution, and one that facilitates and promotes the protection of property rights, thereby fostering economic growth and development. On the other hand, extrajudicial lynchings, at least in the context of US states, have been tied to a lack of property rights and their protection (Carden in Institutions and southern development: lynching as a signal of insecure property rights. Ph.D. Dissertation. Washington University, 2006). However, these two areas of research have not been simultaneously explored. This study rectifies that by evaluating how a relatively independent judiciary might affect lynching rates across US states between 1883 and 1930. Overall, the results suggest that a relatively more independent judiciary (as measured through the method of selection and term length) is associated with a lower likelihood of observing a lynching in a given jurisdiction. This is true for both state courts of last resort and state courts of general jurisdiction.

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Notes

  1. A very related vein of literature regards the impact that terrorism has on economic performance (see Enders, Sandler, and Parise 1992; Meierrieks and Gries 2013; Gries et al. 2011).

  2. It is important to note that several states provided tenure during “good behavior”, while others provided terms for life (or, as in the case of New Hampshire mandatory retirement at the age of 70). In order to operationalize these variables we first create a dummy variable represented by a “1” if a state granted either lifetime appointment or service during “good behavior”. A second approach was to simply take the average number of years that a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States had served (roughly 15 years). This latter information is derived from Calabrasi and Lindgren (2005).

  3. The data from 1833–1930 on lynching make this point concrete. Of the 4,066 lynchings, 397 (9.76%) of them were associated with rape. Of that, 361 (9.09%) of those lynched were black. The height of rape related lynchings came in the 1890s with 180 total lynchings or 4.42%.

  4. In this particular case, Henry Plummer was an elected sheriff and city marshal who also led the road agents gang. While Plummer was not lynched, the mistrust of institutions—and Montana had limited government as well—from the public created a situation whereby credible commitments to uphold the law were restricted to the point vigilante committees were formed.

  5. Data are freely available at http://people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/HAL%20Web%20Page.htm.

  6. Information is freely available at http://judicialselection.us/.

  7. This database is freely available at www.stateconstitutions.umd.edu.

  8. In order to address “0” values in the lynching dataset, we follow what is a standard approach in the literature, and add a very small number (0.0001) to our observations, which then allows us to calculate a meaningful value.

  9. Agricultural employment, urbanization, black population, and the foreign-born population were drawn from US Census data decennially from 1880 to 1930. Annual observations are linearly interpolated from these decennial data. Data for female suffrage come from the national Constitution Center, while data on railroad mileage was taken from Poor’s Manual of Railroads from 1880 to 1930. Railroad data were available annually from 1880 to 1910, then decennially for 1920 and 1930. Missing observations were also linearly interpolated.

  10. While state dummies would be preferable, there were some states with no lynchings occurring in the given data range. Therefore, subregional dummies are employed instead, thus allowing for the inclusion of those states.

  11. Several important caveats should be noted: (1) Only 4 states appointed local attorneys over the sample analyzed, (2) the method of selection is completely time invariant over the sample (meaning that we only report results in Tables 4, 56), and (3) a lack of data availability makes refining this variable down to a county or district level unobtainable. Nevertheless, the current variable provides at least some insight into the role that local attorneys might have.

  12. This index is generated from the eigenvalues of the first two components and is then simply normalized between the values of “0” and “10”. PCA allows us to compress what are otherwise highly correlated independent variables of interest into a single variable that can be employed and thus avoid collinearity problems if each of these variables were included in the model individually. This then provides a more precise result of the statistical relationship, albeit at the expense of there being no meaningful interpretation of the coefficient.

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  1. Troy University, Troy, AL, USA

    John Dove & William J. Byrd

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Dove, J., Byrd, W.J. Judicial independence and lynching in historical context: an analysis of US States. Cliometrica 16, 639–672 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00238-1

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