Applying Theories of Judicial Decision-Making in a New Institutional Setting: French Court of Cassation Rulings on Racist Hate Speech

This article builds on comparative judicial politics research by investigating decision-making patterns in the under-studied institutional setting of a domestic criminal and civil high court. We examine French Court of Cassation decisions in racist hate speech cases, assembling and analyzing a dataset of each of the 255 cases heard by the high court between 1972 and 2012. As expected, given the lower politicization of non-constitutional high courts, strategic dynamics have relatively limited influence in shaping patterns of speech restrictions. Contrary to expectations—especially in the French Civil Law setting—straightforward legal considerations also play a weak role in explaining outcomes. We find that judges’ attitudes and values have a strong effect on overarching patterns of racist hate speech rulings, even in a seemingly unlikely institutional setting. We conclude by drawing out the implications of our findings for scholarship on comparative judicial politics and for research on hate speech.