This chapter continues the task of considering what, beyond law as it is often imagined, accounts for judicial decision-making. It explores work investigating the influence of motivated reasoning on judges’ behavior, including that which emphasizes the influence of judges’ desire to satisfy the expectations of groups such as their professional peers. It examines the celebrity culture that has arisen around many Supreme Court justices as providing an avenue for the influence of motivated cognition. It also explores other research into the influence of psychological phenomena, such as heuristics and biases, on judges’ decision-making and finally considers the significance of our tendency to notice bias more readily in others than in ourselves.

This chapter considers the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction engages with globalization, a process that intensified in the 1990s and which became a central theme in his fiction from The Moor’s Last Sigh onwards. This is especially pressing in Rushdie’s work in considerations of the global circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural productions, most pertinently explored in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. Focusing both on the aesthetics of these novels and their wider cultural contexts, I argue that Rushdie’s post-fatwa novels showcase a shift in his view of the transglobal world, which can be traced on three levels: the portrayal of space, the role attributed to creativity, and the emotional response globalization elicits.