Empirical Legal Studies

Q&A With Andrew Martin

Over at SCOTUSblog, I posted a Q&A session with Andrew Martin, who is a former guest blogger on ELS and current professor of law and chair of the political science department at Washington University.  I interviewed Andrew about the potential academic and non-academic uses of his Martin-Quinn scores of judicial ideology.  I also asked him a number of questions about his new co-authored piece on ideological drift of Supreme Court Justices, see here, with Lee Epstein, Kevin Quinn, and Jeffrey Segal, which is forthcoming in issue four of the Northwestern University Law Review.  As you may know, the ideological drift piece has been cited and discussed in the popular media and it triggered interesting responses from such excellent scholars as Ward Farnsworth, see here, David Strauss, see here, and Stephen Burbank, see here.  Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times even weighed in the on the issue here. 

Transfers, US News Gaming, and Brand Dilution

Entering credentials of transfer students are irrelevant to U.S. News ranking calculations.  As a result, many have speculated that transfers are fertile ground for U.S. News gaming.  This post examines data on 2L transfers, which the ABA recently collected and released in the 2008 Official Guide.  In short, there are a lot of transfers, particularly to schools with high U.S. News rankings.  Here the breakdown by US News Tier:

USNWR '07            Net Transfers 
    Tier 1                                +694
    Tier 2                                +223
    Tier 3                                 -114
    Tier 4                                 -739

Why am I posting on transfer students?  That is an important subtext.  During a recent conversation, hiring partners at one of the nation's largest and most prestigious firms (biglaw X) complained to me that they were running across a lot of transfer students at elite law school Y (where pre-screening is not permitted) with nondistinguished 1L records from Tier 2 or 3 schools.  As a follow-up to our conversation, I crunched the numbers from the 2008 Official Guide.

But the more salient issue is how firm X responded in the absence of hard data.  Because the transfer students could not meet the grade cutoff for an interview at their old school, (a) they did not receive a callback, (b) firm X wasted 30 minutes x 2 lawyers for each incident, and (c) a perception took root that elite law school Y was diluting its product through an unprincipled transfer policy designed to "sell" 2L admission at full tuition price in order to constrict and subsidize a smaller crop of 1L students with higher LSAT scores--and through the process, increase its US News ranking.  The hiring partners had a clear, unflinching grasp of the underlying dynamics.  Did administrators at law school Y really believe that no one would notice?

In our Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores study, Andy Morriss and I theorized that a heavy intake of transfer students was likely the preferred gaming strategy of high ranked schools (lower ranked schools, in contrast, relied upon part-time programs).  For schools who were in the U.S. News first quartile in 1992, constriction of the 1L full-time class over the next 12 years was associated with larger gains in median LSAT scores.  (At the time, we lacked the data on transfers, which we thought would reveal a revenue-neutral strategy that worked in lockstep with 1L constriction.)

But here are the difficult institutional questions: 

• Reputation.  Is a slight increase in median 1L LSAT scores worth the damage to a law school reputation among employers?   Arguably law school Y's biggest mistake was taking all comers rather than building a larger pool of transfer applicants.  Apparently, some Tier 1 and 2 law schools actively solicit transfer applicants and thus can be more selective.  Over time, this could easily evolve into a second, substantial admissions process.
• Payoffs to the school.  Although students and faculty may be jubilant over a bump in the rankings from #14 to #12, or #22 to #19, are more opportunities thereby available to graduates, especially if the gaming strategy is being flagged by key employers? 
• Payoffs to transfer students.  And what about the students with nondistinguished records from lower ranked schools who incurred huge debt for a elite credential in order to subsidize a high LSAT 1L--are these transfer students, with a paucity of callbacks and no 1L peer relationships, clearly better off?  See 2005 LSSSE Report (showing heightened social isolation for transfer students)
  
• Externalities on legal education.  Can we all agree that any underlying increase in U.S. News rank has zero substance?  If so, should the ABA crack down on law schools that divert a lot of resources toward recruiting 2L students for no other purpose than boosting entering credentials of 1Ls?

Without further ado, here is the graph for transfers (Tiers 1-2), ordered by 2007 U.S. News rankings and normalized as a percentage of each school's graduating class [click-on to enlarge].  In Tier 1, Georgetown (+14%) and Washington University (+18%) have the largest net inflow of transfer students.  In Tier 2, the big net gainers are Florida State (+20%) and Rutgers-Camden (+16%).  The graph for Tiers 3-4,  in many respects the mirror opposite of Tiers 1-2, is after the jump.

Data Cleaning Hints

A helpful post over at the Social Science Statistics blog illustrates how data visualization techniques can be pressed into data cleaning service.

Round-up of Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky

My good friend Paul Caron has created a single post at TaxProf that collects, in alphabetical order by author, all the advice for Erwin Chemerinsky.   In total, forty lawyers, law professors, and administrators contributed to this series.   Although Paul and I got the ball rolling for this series,  soliciting dozens of submissions, it was Paul who did the editing, posting, and collecting all the wonderful links.   Paul, you did a fabulous job.

I am confident that we have collectively supplied some very good ideas.   It is up to Erwin to find the golden nuggets.  We wish him much success at UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Law.

JELS 4:3 (2007)

On behalf of the JELS editors I am delighted to note that the most recent issue (4:3, Nov. 2007) was recently shipped to subscribers and libraries and is also accessible on-line (here). Papers in this issue range from Dan Kahan (Yale) et al.'s assessment of the "white-male" effect in risk perception to Pascoe Pleasence & Nigel Balmer's (Univ. College London) randomized study of debt advice in England and Wales.

Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE) at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (www.acle.nl), is a joint initiative of the economics and law faculties of the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality research in the fields at the interface of law and economics. Located in the heart of Amsterdam’s old city, the ACLE presently associates around twenty scholars in both disciplines, ranging from full professor to PhD students. The Center's main focus areas are: Competition & Regulation, Corporate Governance & Law, and Foundations of Law & Economics.

 Vacancy for the position of (Full) Professor of Empirical Legal Studies (1,0 Fte)

The purpose of the Chair is to strengthen empirical research in law and economics, and particularly the application of legal analysis, statistical inference and economic modeling to fundamental areas of national and international law ranging from tort liability, property and intellectual property, contracts, criminal law, to law enforcement and litigation.

The prospective Chair-holder should be an established researcher with international standing reflected in high-level publications in top law & economics journals. We envision a researcher that has a rigorous knowledge of relevant fields of law combined with econometrical and statistical skills. The principal tasks are active engagement in research, teaching and course development, and the supervision of PhD students and post docs.

The Chair in empirical legal studies is a full time tenured position in the Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE). The formal appointment of the Chair will be within the Faculty of Law.

While a senior position is available, the position could also be filled at a more junior level, i.e. a tenure-track appointment that could mature over time to a full professor.

Further information

For further information, please contact Prof. Arnoud Boot (A.W.A.Boot@uva.nl, +31 20 525 4162) or Dr. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci (gdarimat@uva.nl, +31 (0) 20 525 7157).

A further description and instructions on how to apply are available on www.english.uva.nl/vacancies. The deadline for application is 15 December 2007.

7th Circuit Conference

Steve Wasby sent me the following announcement to pass along:

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale's School of Law announces conference on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

The conference will be held on February 22 and 23, 2008, at the law school.  The focus of the conference will be on the process by which the court decides cases, including its relations with other courts. Topics to be covered include aspects of the judges' decision-making; the court's caseload and how it is handled; the way in which circuit precedent is developed and announced; and the court's relationship to district courts and the Supreme Court. This will be one of the first academic conferences to examine the workings of this important and influential court. Presenters and commentators will include several judges of the court, district judges, and political science and law professors.

There will be no registration fee for the conference, but advance registration will be required. The conference is offered for CLE credit, which will require a fee. Those who wish information about conference logistics should contact Ms. Bonnie Miller at SIU-C Law School (bmiller@siu.edu; 618-453-8730).

Stephen L. Wasby
Professor Emeritus, University at Albany

Pay and Workweek Differentials by Law Firm Size

I am working on a series of interrelated projects on law firm economics.  In my research, I recently ran across an interesting NALP data release on median associate salaries by year and firm size (2007 income).  To visualize the data, I generated the trend chart below [click to enlarge].  As the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1,000 words.

The median salary spread for a 1st year associate at a 2 -25 lawyer firm versus a 500+ firm is $77,000.  When the reference group is a 51-100 lawyer law firm versus 500+, the differential is still a substantial $55,000 per year.  Cumulatively, for all eight years of the associate track, the spread amounts to $631,000 for 2-25 vs. 500+ lawyer firms and $524,000 for 51-100 vs. 500+.  In other words, the bimodal distribution discussed in an earlier post appears to hold fairly steady during the first several years of a young associate's career.  In fact, most 8th year associates at firms smaller than 250 lawyers are making less than a 1st year associate at a 500+ lawyer firm.

Before readers (especially students) anchor on the dollars, it is worth asking whether the smaller paychecks translate into substantially fewer hours and a better work/life balance.  There are two fairly good sources of data to address this question: (1) the After the JD Project, and (2) an ABA Young Lawyers Division Survey.  Both of these datasets were compiled with the help of researchers from the American Bar Foundation.  A related resource is the Young Associates in Trouble essay/study, which I c0-authored last year with David Zaring (Wharton).  One of our central insights, amply supported by data, was the large variation in work environments among large law firms.

Graphics from these studies  appear after the jump.

Funding Opportunity for Litigation Scholarship

Jennifer K. Robbennolt (Illinois), as Chair of AALS Section on Law and Social Sciences, asked that I post information about a funding opportunity for scholarship related to litigation.   The ABA Section of Litigation will make a number of awards of $5,000 - $20,000 to support research relevant to civil litigation. The criteria are set out in the Announcement found here.

Call for Papers - Law & Society Associations

The combined 2008 annual meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association are scheduled for Thursday, May 29 through Sunday, June 1 in Montreal. The deadline for paper proposals is December 12th.

"The theme for this meeting signals that law is rooted in places — from families and villages to the global economy — and that law has the power to place and displace people in space, time, and relationships. We invite papers and encourage multi-disciplinary scholarship that reflect on the many dimensions of law, place, and power."

More information can be found here.