Analyzing judicial discrimination

When an individual is treated in a judicial decision in a way that is affected by his race, socioeconomic status or some other legally irrelevant characteristic, he is subjected to discrimination. In this paper, various methods for analyzing discrimination of this type are discussed. Mathematically, the severity of a correct decision can be seen as a function of various characteristics of the individual and his behavior. It is argued that in ordinary cases the form of this function must be known for any analysis of discrimination to be possible. A method is presented for the analysis when the function has linear form but unknown structure.