Empirical Legal Studies

The Inefficacy of Restaurant Grading

Dan Ho's (Stanford) interesting paper on restaurant grading, Fudging the Nudge: Information Disclosure and Restaurant Grading, appears in the current YLJ (122: 574, 2012) and will likely appeal to "foodies" (as well as  those looking for a brief respite from grinding through fall semester grading). The paper exploits data from San Diego and New York and uncovers various structural challenges incident to information disclosure to consumers. The abstract follows.

"One of the most promising regulatory currents consists of “targeted” disclosure: mandating simplified information disclosure at the time of decisionmaking to “nudge” parties along. Its poster child is restaurant sanitation grading. In principle, a simple posted letter grade (‘A,’ ‘B,’ or ‘C’) empowers consumers and properly incentivizes restaurateurs to reduce risks for foodborne illness. Yet empirical evidence of the efficacy of restaurant grading is sparse. This Article fills the void by studying over 700,000 health inspections of restaurants across ten jurisdictions, focusing on San Diego and New York. Despite grading’s great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation, and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge. In San Diego, grade inflation reigns. Nearly all restaurants receive ‘A’s. In New York, inspections exhibit little substantive consistency. A good score does not meaningfully predict cleanliness down the road. Unsurprisingly, New York’s implementation of letter grading in 2010 has not discernably reduced manifestations of foodborne illness. Perhaps worse, the system perversely shifts inspection resources away from higher health hazards to resolve grade disputes. These results have considerable implications, not only for food safety, but also for the institutional design of information disclosure."

ABF Scholar Information & Past Scholars

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) invites scholars to join our intellectual community for the 2013-2014 academic year. We encourage national and international scholars on leave or sabbatical to take advantage of our diverse community and excellent facilities. We offer an office, telephone, and computer, but no stipend.

Preference will be given to visitors whose scholarship coincides with the research agenda of the ABF, and who will be in residence full-time for all or part of the year. Summer visits are possible. Visitors are expected to participate in the intellectual life of the ABF, including a weekly seminar.

If you have an interest in this opportunity, please send an email to Jothie Rajah at jrajah@abfn.org, Subject Line: Visiting Scholars Program, which states (1) the topic on which you are working, (2) the preferred dates for residence, (3) the days each week you would expect to be at the ABF, and (4) attach a CV. Applications should be received by April 1, 2013. Applications will be considered as space allows. The ABF Appointments Committee will review applications and prospective visitors will be notified accordingly.

Modeling Long (and Triple) Jumping

Andrew Gelman (Columbia) passes along (and seeks input on) this intereting post from the long (and triple) jump coach at Boise State University, Jeff Petersmeyer (who also coached horizontal jumpers at the 2012 Olympics). Jeff wonders how to better deploy statistical modeling into the service of predicting jumpers' potential. Evidently, a "Moneyball" perspective is migrating into the world of track & field.

WELS Conference--Proposal Deadline Extended Until Jan. 4, 2013

The WELS conference organizer, Joe Doherty (UCLA), recently announced that the Call for Papers: 2nd Annual Western Empirical Legal Studies (WELS) Conference at UCLA has been extended until January 4, 2013.

WELS conference information follows:

The UCLA School of Law Empirical Legal Scholars Association (ELSA) is proud to announce the 2nd Annual Western Empirical Legal Studies Conference, to be held at UCLA on March 2, 2013.

WELS is a conference for law and graduate students that provides a unique opportunity for emerging ELS scholars to present their work in front of an audience of peers. The inaugural conference attracted participants from Europe and from seven universities and law schools across the U.S. If you are a professor who has students who might be interested in WELS, please pass this along.

For more information and instructions on submitting an abstract visit the conference website or contact the ELSA staff at: ELSA@lawnet.ucla.edu.

The Empirics of Twombly and Iqbal

A paper now circulating in SSRN (and forthcoming in Judicature) explores the impact of Twombly and Iqbal on dismissal rates and does so with an interesting methodological twist. A New Look: Dismissal Rates in Federal Civil Cases, by Scott Dodson (Hastings), contributes to the growing empirical literature by coding at the individual claim--rather than the case--level. The abstract follows.

"In the wake of Twombly and Iqbal, a number of studies have been conducted to determine the decisions' effects on dismissal practice in federal civil cases. However, those studies have tended to code whole cases rather than claims -- leading to the ambiguous coding category of “mixed” dismissals and to problems in characterizing the nature of the dispute -- and have failed to distinguish between legal sufficiency and factual sufficiency, potentially masking important detail about the effects of the pleadings changes.

This paper begins to fill in that detail. I compiled an original dataset of district court opinions and coded each claim -- rather than whole case -- subject to an adjudicated Rule 12(b)(6) motion. For each claim, I also determined whether the court resolved the motion on grounds of legal or factual sufficiency. This methodology opened an unprecedented level of granularity in the data.

The data reveal statistically significant increases in the dismissal rate overall and in a number of subsets of claims. I also find an increase in the relative prevalence and efficacy of factual-insufficiency arguments for dismissal. Perhaps surprisingly, I find a decrease in the relative prevalence and efficacy of legal-insufficiency arguments for dismissal. These data and insights on the rationales of dismissals are new to the literature and suggest that Twombly and Iqbal are affecting both movant strategy and judicial reasoning."

Ranking Journal Rankings

Cornell colleagues, Ted Eisenberg and Marty Wells, empirically analyze leading ranking metrics for refereed law journals in their recent paper, Ranking Law Journals and the Limits of Journal Citation Reports. Their analysis of ranking outcomes emphasizes a pre-occupation with ordinal ranking and database bias. The abstract follows:

"Rankings of schools, scholars, and journals emphasize ordinal rank. Journal rankings published by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are widely used to assess research quality, which influences important decisions by academic departments, universities, and countries. We study refereed law journal rankings by JCR, Washington and Lee Law Library (W&L), and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Both JCR’s and W&L’s multiple measures of journals can be represented by a single latent factor. Yet JCR’s rankings are uncorrelated with W&L’s. The differences appear to be attributable to underrepresentation of law journals in JCR’s database. We illustrate the effects of database bias on rankings through case studies of three elite journals, the Journal of Law & Economics, Supreme Court Review, and the American Law & Economics Review. Cluster analysis is a supplement to ordinal ranking and we report the results of a cluster analysis of law journals. The ARC does organize journals into four large groups and provides generally reasonable rankings of journals. But anomalies exist that could be avoided by checking the ARC groups against citation-based measures. Entities that rank should use their data to provide meaningful clusters rather than providing only ordinal ranks."