[nefoo62]

I don't have a reference handy, but I seem to recall that that study on judges' verdicts being influenced by temperature, how close they were to lunchtime and so on, failed to replicate. I wouldn't be surprised if the OP study fails to replicate as well. They have a relatively high number of data points (to get an idea of order of magnitude: mortality of 145 across 2064 operations on birthdays) but only reach a P-value of 0.03 on their main conclusion.

[mattkrause]

The judges-at-lunch thing turned out not to be a good “natural experiment” because the prisoners were systematically ordered.

The parole board considered cases from one prison at a time. Within each prison, prisoners representing themselves went last and they tended to fair worse than those with attorneys. The judges tended to take meal breaks between prisons, and....poof, there’s the result.

[im3w1l]

This one? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3645463