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As recipients of a "Comment" longer than our own article, we cannot help being reminded of Abraham Lincoln's story about the man who was being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Queried by a bystander, the man replied: "Actually, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk." We appreciate the courtesy of the Journal in permitting us to make a brief nonfeminist response to a self-described feminist critique of a nonfeminist article.We have, of course, the same ultimate destination as Ms. Brockman, that being some empirically grounded understanding of whether, and if so how, the participation of women judges is changing the judicial system. This is a very large and a very important question; our immediate and much more modest purpose, as our opening comments stressed, was "to assess one fragment of the accumulating evidence." It seemed to us that it would have been important to know if women trial judges were reversed far more often than men, or if the performance of women appeal judges differed from that of their male colleagues in some way that could be generally characterized and linked to gender. This being so, it seemed just as important—although much less exciting—to report that there is (in one province, over a limited number of years, on criminal cases only) no clear indication of either of these trends.

AbstractGiven the recent penetration of the judicial profession by women, and concomitant speculation about the possible impact of women judges upon judicial decision-making, the authors examine criminal appeals to the Alberta Court of Appeal between 1985 and 1992 to address in general statistical terms the parameters of the participation of women judges. The results suggest that there is little statistically identifiable difference in the performance of men and women judges, even on specific issues such as sexual assault offenses, and what modest differences can be found are in the opposite direction from those suggested by comparable research in the United States