Empirical Legal Studies

Puzzle 1: How Inefficient is Tort Law?

Does the tort system generate significantly greater administrative cost than comparable first-party insurance, such as health insurance and workers' compensation? It is commonly thought so. In their 1987 book, Landes and Posner called the tort system “an exceedingly costly insurance mechanism.” Others have made the same criticism, noting that tort awards are much greater than amounts paid under comparable first-party insurance policies. 

There are two issues here. The "high costs" of the tort system, relative to first-party insurance, could be due to (i) its greater administrative cost or (ii) its broader coverage (or both). It is well known that tort law offers broader coverage than market insurance. Most notably, it compensates noneconomic harms, such as the pain and suffering arising from an accident. This undoubtedly raises the cost of the tort system relative to first-party insurance. But it’s a separate question whether tort law generates greater administrative expense, per dollar of compensation paid, relative to first-party insurance. Although it is widely believed that the tort system is administratively inefficient, what data support this claim?

Law Profs, Externally Funded Research, and ELS

Over at Prawfsblawg, Ron Wright (Wake Forest) has an interesting post about externally funded research, law schools, and the obvious implications for empirical legal scholars.  Well worth a look.

Puzzles and Methods

Thanks, Jason, for welcoming me to the ELS Blog. I will use my airtime this week for two purposes: (1) to highlight some “empirical puzzles” that have, well, puzzled me over the years and (2) to raise a few questions about popular empirical methods in the Law and Economics literature. I look forward to a fun discussion with ELS Blog readers.

With that short introduction, here goes …

 

Where did High-End Plaintiffs’ Lawyers go to Law School?

One of my favorite topics in my Law Firms as a Business Organization course  is the plaintiffs' bar, which runs the gamut from soft tissue personal injuries ("car wreck cases"), to product liability and mass torts, to class action litigation.  Law students and law professors know very little about this practice area.  From the student perspective, this gap may be due to the fact that firms that specialize in this area tend to be small and rarely recruit students through on-campus interviews.  Similarly, the corporate bar heavily recruits from top national law schools, where most law professors were educated.  So legal educators are top-heavy with corporate law practice.

In some respects, the plaintiffs' bar appears to reflect an idiosyncrasy in the market for legal talent.  On the one hand, successful plaintiff-side trial and class action lawyers often earn higher incomes than partners at the nation's largest and most prestigious law firms.  On the other hand, these lawyers tend to be graduates of non-elite law schools.   Below is graphic (generated for my class), which compares the educational backgrounds of members of the Inner Circle 100, which is the 100 best plaintiffs' side trial lawyers in the nation (and includes Joe Jamail, John Edwards, Phil Corboy, and, until his death, Johnny Cochrane), and a sample of five Am Law 200 law firms.
Granted, some (or possibly all) of this differential can be explained by the more stable earnings trajectory of corporate lawyers.  But I also wonder whether successful trial practice may entail attributes that are not strongly correlated with law school entering credentials (e.g., LSAT and UGPA).  For example, effective trial lawyers may have better affect recognition, and thus have a superior ability to size up their adversaries and communicate with a jury.

Guest Blogger: Ed Morrison

This week's guest blogger is Edward Morrison, an Associate Professor of Law at Columbia.  Ed received his J.D. and Ph.D. (Economics) from the University of Chicago, and clerked for both Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner and Supreme Court Justice Scalia. Ed's areas of expertise include bankruptcy, law and economics, and corporate reorganization.  His recent scholarly work includes "Bankruptcy Decisionmaking: An Empirical Study of Continuation Bias in Chapter 11"  forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Economics.

Data on Supreme Court Oral Argument

I've been invited to Carnegie Mellon to attend an NSF-sponsored workshop about how we can use the data available from Supreme Court Oral Argument.  This grows out of a broad expansion of the The Oyez Project (which has been substantially updated so check it out). 

The goal of the workshop is to get information from invited scholars in a number of fields (law professors, linguists, computer scientists, psychologists) about how to use oral argument data.  The data now available are XML-formatted transcripts of all Supreme Court oral arguments between 1979 and 2005, along with the associated audio recordings.  This format, using ProjectPad and Plone software, will allow for the creation of a structured codeable database for SCOTUS Oral Argument where coded categories can be exported into tab delimited files.  These audio/transcript formatted transcripts are aligned to the sentence/word level for arguments from 2000-2005.

This electronic database has been produced by the efforts of the Principal Investigators: Jerry Goldman (Political Science, Northwestern), Mark Liberman (Linguistics & Computer Science, Penn), Timothy Johnson (Political Science, Minnesota), and Brian MacWhinney (Psychology & Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon).  For more information on the data, contact Jerry Goldman.

UPDATE: Check out this great post by Mark Liberman over at Language Log that references the workshop and has some fun with Justice Co-Voting Percentages.