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.