How does courtroom technology shape judicial decision-making? This paper examines how video teleconferencing (VTC) influences adjudication in U.S. immigration courts, where judges increasingly conduct hearings remotely. Focusing on detained respondents from 2007 to 2024, I analyze whether the use of VTC affects the likelihood of removal. Drawing on a large dataset of immigration proceedings, I estimate regression models with and without court, judge, and year fixed effects, and use causal mediation analysis to assess pathways through which VTC may affect outcomes. The results indicate that VTC is associated with a higher probability of removal. These findings demonstrate how changes in courtroom technology may shape access to justice and raise questions about the relationship between due process and substantive outcomes in immigration courts.

Key actors in U.S. legal proceedings, including witnesses, parties, and attorneys, increasingly appear in court remotely via video teleconferencing (VTC). VTC feeds are notorious for connectivity failures in ways that arguably undermine the procedural fairness of legal proceedings. I consider whether exposure to disrupted VTC procedures undermines an individual's perception of procedural fairness and willingness to accept an unfavorable legal outcome. I also consider whether the effect of exposure to VTC failures is enhanced or attenuated by exposure to the legitimating symbols of law that typically appear in a courtroom. I develop a survey experimental design that relies on original artistic renderings of immigration asylum hearings, a legal setting in which VTC use has increased dramatically. I find that individuals exposed to disrupted VTC procedures are less likely to perceive of immigration courts as procedurally fair. This effect does not depend on the context of exposure.

Organizations use non-expert volunteers to monitor the performance of state officials. During training exercises, organizations sometimes expose volunteers to opinions about the officials they will monitor, potentially biasing reporting in the direction of the organization’s perspectives. We study this possibility through an immersive experimental study, which draws on scenes from a short film our team created, Today’s Docket. Two versions of the film manipulate a training and a virtual visit to an immigration court. We find that providing subjects in training with negative opinions about immigration judge behavior both lowers perceptions of the extent to which the judge respects due process norms and attenuates the effect of actually viewing poor immigration judge behavior. Our findings suggest that the bias organizations may produce is particularly likely when immigration judges do in fact ensure procedural fairness. Our methodological approach illustrates a pathway for building collaborations between artists and social scientists.

Lawyers presenting their arguments before the US Supreme Court expect to be interrupted by the justices; it is a time-honored tradition of the Court. However, research has shown that attorneys and justices who are women are interrupted more frequently, giving them less opportunity than their peers have to raise the points they wish to emphasize. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the justices switched the format of oral argument; attorneys presented over teleconference and the justices asked their questions serially in assigned time periods, rather than jumping in at will throughout the argument. We hypothesize that this temporary change in format may have had the unintended benefit of limiting interruptions overall and equalizing the treatment of attorneys and justices of different genders. We test this hypothesis by comparing interruption patterns during the first half of the October 2019 term, in which oral arguments were held in the traditional manner, with those in the second half of the term, in which oral arguments were held via teleconference. We look only at cases where review was granted before COVID-19 was declared a national emergency and the Court decided to switch format. Because the Court did not know that the format would change at the time review was granted, the emergency serves as a natural experiment, allowing us to compare cases argued in the traditional format to those using teleconference as if they were randomly assigned.