  This study assesses the effect of the #MeToo movement on the language used in
judicial opinions on sexual violence related cases from 51 U.S. state and
federal appellate courts. The study introduces various indicators to quantify
the extent to which actors in courtrooms employ language that implicitly shifts
responsibility away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. One indicator
measures how frequently the victim is mentioned as the grammatical subject, as
research in the field of psychology suggests that victims are assigned more
blame the more often they are referred to as the grammatical subject. The other
two indices designed to gauge the level of victim-blaming capture the sentiment
of and the context in sentences referencing the victim and/or perpetrator.
Additionally, judicial opinions are transformed into bag-of-words and tf-idf
vectors to facilitate the examination of the evolution of language over time.
The causal effect of the #MeToo movement is estimated by means of a
Difference-in-Differences approach comparing the development of the language in
opinions on sexual offenses and other crimes against persons as well as a Panel
Event Study approach. The results do not clearly identify a
#MeToo-movement-induced change in the language in court but suggest that the
movement may have accelerated the evolution of court language slightly, causing
the effect to materialize with a significant time lag. Additionally, the study
considers potential effect heterogeneity with respect to the judge's gender and
political affiliation. The study combines causal inference with text
quantification methods that are commonly used for classification as well as
with indicators that rely on sentiment analysis, word embedding models and
grammatical tagging.
