Prompted partly by Cass Sunstein's study of the influence of a judge's ideology on court of appeals decisions, Moin Yahya (Alberta, Law) and James Stribopoulos (Osgoode Hall, Law) undertake a similar study of "the busiest appellate court in Canada, the Court of Appeal for Ontario." In Does a Judge's Party of Appointment or Gender Matter to Case Outcomes? An Empirical Study of the Court of Appeal for Ontario (Canada), the authors find that:
"... at least in certain categories of cases, both party of appointment and gender are statistically significant in explaining case outcomes. Between these two variables, gender actually appears to be the stronger determinant of outcome in certain types of cases."
Venturing beyond the empirics, the authors also argue that their "study also points toward a simple solution. Diversity in the composition of appeal panels both from the standpoint of gender and party of appointment dampened the statistical influence of either variable. In other words, in the case of gender, a single judge on a panel who is of the opposite sex from the others, or in the case of political party, a single judge appointed by a different political party, is sufficient to eliminate the potential distorting influence of either variable."
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