Do Judges Hate Speculators?

Historically, people have often expressed negative feelings toward speculators, a sentiment that might have even been reinforced since the latest financial crisis, dur- ing which taxpayer money was warranted or spent to bail out reckless investors. In this paper, we conjecture that judges may also have anti-speculator sentiment, which might affect their professional decision making. We asked 123 professional law- yers and 247 law students in Germany this question, and they clearly predicted that judges would have an anti-speculator bias. However, in an actual behavioral study, 185 judges did not exhibit such bias. In another sample of 170 professional lawyers, we found weak support for an anti-speculator bias. This evidence suggests that an independent audience may actually perceive unbiased judgments as biased. While the literature usually suggests that a communication problem exists between lawyers and non-lawyers (i.e. between judges and the general public), we find that this prob- lem can also exist within the legal community