Acts of violence and terror accentuate in-group bias and discriminatory court rulings.

Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000-04, where the assignment of a case to an Arab or Jewish judge is essentially random.

We find robust evidence for judicial ingroup bias. Furthermore, this bias increases with terrorism intensity in the vicinity of the court in the year preceding the ruling.

The results are consistent with theory and lab evidence according to which salience of group membership enhances social identification.

Not a shocking finding, but a solid one in a field where evidence typically comes from contrived lab experiments. It arrives from Moses Shayo and Asaf Zussman.