Legal scholars studying judicial decision-making have long endorsed the premise that judges are largely impartial and objective arbiters in most cases. Human behavior, however, tells a different story. This article provides a comprehensive account of the unavoidable influence of bias, emotion, and empathy on judging by marshaling scientific evidence from neuroscience. It does so by articulating three novel neuroscientific insights that explain the inevitability of such influences.

First, human decision-making is a process implicating multiple, intertwined brain regions and networks; reason is not disconnected from emotion and bias in the brain. Second, our biases, emotional responses, empathic capacities, and other cognitive processes can be implicit or unconscious, shaping behavior in ways we are unaware of. This finding undermines the ancient assumption that judges can simply set aside their emotions when rendering decisions. Third, there is no neuroscientific evidence that judges are exempt from these basic human cognitive processes. These insights unsettle the myth of judges as perfect reasoners and impartial arbiters, revealing that such views are increasingly contradicted by scientific evidence about how our brains actually work. By providing a descriptively accurate neuroscientific account of judicial behavior, the article offers a new perspective on why bias, emotion, and empathy can undermine judicial impartiality. It urges us to see judges as human.