Empirical Legal Studies

Who "Owns" History?

While questions about who owns judges' official working papers implicate legal historians most directly, such (admittedly complex) questions should also interest empirical legal historians. In "Judges and Their Papers," Kathryn Watts (Washington) makes the case that judicial papers should be construed as public rather than private property. An excerpted abstract follows.

"This Article is the first to give significant attention to the question of who should own federal judges’ working papers and what should happen to the papers once a judge leaves the bench. Upon the 35th anniversary of the enactment of the Presidential Records Act, this Article argues that judges’ working papers should be treated as governmental property — just as presidential papers are. Although there are important differences between the roles of President and judge, none of the differences suggest that judicial papers should be treated as a species of private property. Rather, the unique position of federal judges, including the judiciary’s independence, should be taken into account when crafting rules that speak to reasonable access to and disposition of judicial papers — not when answering the threshold question of ownership. Ultimately, this Article — giving renewed attention to a long forgotten 1977 governmental study commissioned by Congress — argues that Congress should declare judicial papers public property and should empower the judiciary to promulgate rules implementing the shift to public ownership. These would include, for example, rules governing the timing of public release of judicial papers. By involving the judiciary in implementing the shift to public ownership, Congress would enhance the likelihood of judicial cooperation, mitigate separation of powers concerns, and enable the judiciary to safeguard judicial independence, collegiality and confidentiality."

More Workshops: Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship

Andrew Martin (Wash U.) and Lee Epstein (USC) will hold their 12th annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop, from May 22-24, 2013, in Los Angeles, CA. For more and logistical information on the Workshop, co-sponsored by Washington University School of Law and USC Gould School of Law, click here.

Emerging Data on Stata's YouTube Channel

While noting that Stata does not shy away from holding its own initiatives up to data should not surprise, a summary report on the initial six months of Stata's YouTube Channel usage might interest readers. If there is any surprise in a summary (and descriptive) blog post (here), perhaps it's the degree to which this project is succeeding. What Stata is doing is certainly generating interest (thus far, anyway) and I assume we'll see similar efforts by others in the near future.

"Justice Flunks Math"

With the Amanda Knox trial re-engaged in Italy, an op-ed in today's New York Times, "Justice Flunks Math," underscores a regrettable point: Lawyers' (and judges') unfamiliarity with even basic probability theory can fuel "grave errors of law" (not to mention casts even more unflattering light onto the legal profession generally). The op-ed authors even manage to rough-up one of Lawrence Tribe's (Harvard) early articles where he laments the "overbearing impressiveness" of numbers used in the trial context.

Stata and Multilevel Modeling

A pair of recent posts (and related videos) on the Stata Blog involving multilevel modeling warrants note. Part 1 (and related video) and Part 2 (and video) walk readers through such topics as hierarchical or multilevel data as well as how to analyze longitudinal data with Stata’s xtmixed command. Insofar as many empirical legal projects involve data structurally nested within counties and/or states, circuits, etc., multilevel techniques are quite important.

USN 2014 Rankings

As you've probably heard, the U.S. News 2014 Law School Rankings are out. Rather than offer commentary, I thought I'd piggyback on Paul Caron's useful post comparing the overall rankings with the peer reputation rankings. So here, for your edification, are the numbers Paul compiled in scatterplot form. (PDF)

2013 Causal Inference Workshops: Main and Advanced

Information on two separate (Main and Advanced) Causal Inference Workshops at Northwestern Law School this summer follows. Both workshops will be taught by world-class causal inference researchers. Registration for each is limited to 100 participants.

  

Main workshop: Monday – Friday, June 24-28, 2013 

Advanced workshop: Monday - Wednesday, August 12-14, 2013.

For information and to register for either or both workshops: (click here)

Main Workshop Overview and Target Audience: Most empirical methods courses survey a variety of methods. We will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and discuss how to design research to come closer to that goal. The methods are often adapted to a particular study. Some of the methods we will discuss are covered in PhD programs, but rarely in depth, and rarely with a focus on causal inference and on which methods to prefer for messy, real-world datasets with limited sample sizes. Each day will include with a Stata “workshop” to illustrate selected methods with real data and Stata code. We will assume knowledge, at the level of an upper-level college econometrics or similar course, of multivariate regression, including OLS, logit, and probit; basic probability and statistics including conditional and compound probabilities, confidence intervals, t-statistics, and standard errors; and some understanding of instrumental variables.

Advanced Workshop Overview and Target Audience: The advanced workshop seeks to provide an in-depth discussion of selected topics at the causal inference research frontier. Our target audience is empirical researchers who are familiar with the basics of causal inference (from our main workshop or otherwise), and want to extend their knowledge.

The Empirics of Regulation

Now that Cass Sunstein (Harvard) has departed the Obama Administration (and OIRA) and migrated back to academic life, in a recent paper published by the University of Chicago Law Review, Empirically Informed Regulation, Sunstein illustrates the central role data play (or, at least should play) in the development of regulations, with an emphasis on behavioral economics. The paper's abstract follows.

"In recent years, social scientists have been incorporating empirical findings about human behavior into economic models. These findings offer important insights for thinking about regulation and its likely consequences. They also offer some suggestions about the appropriate design of effective, low-cost, choice-preserving approaches to regulatory problems, including disclosure requirements, default rules, and simplification. A general lesson is that small, inexpensive policy initiatives can have large and highly beneficial effects. In the United States, a large number of recent practices and reforms reflect an appreciation of this lesson. They also reflect an understanding of the need to ensure that regulations have strong empirical foundations, both through careful analysis of costs and benefits in advance and through retrospective review of what works and what does not."

Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop, May 22-24

The Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop is for law professors and other members of the legal community, social science faculty, and graduate students interested in learning about empirical research.  Leading empirical scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin teach the workshop and provide the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies and use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data.

 

Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop.

 

Register Now!

https://mylaw.usc.edu/empiricalWorkshop/registerOnline.cfm

 

May 22 - 24, 2013

 

The 12th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop 

at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law

Presented by USC Gould School of Law and Washington University Law

 

 

For more information, visit:  http://law.usc.edu/EmpiricalWorkshop 

 

Instructor  

Lee Epstein, Provost Professor and Rader Family Trustee Chair in Law and Political Science at University of Southern California, is a leading empirical legal scholar and a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has co-organized and co-led this annual empirical scholarship workshop for the past eleven years.

 

Instructor  

Andrew Martin, Professor of Law and Political Science, and Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law at Washington University, specializes in political methodology and has written widely on American political institutions, including the Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals. He has co-organized and co-taught the empirical scholarship workshop with Professor Epstein for the last eleven years.

 

Unions and Worker Safety

Allison Morantz (Stanford) has an interesting paper, Coal Mine Safety: Do Unions Make a Difference?, in the current Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 66:1 (Jan. 1, 2013). The paper draws from UMWA data and finds that increased unionization correlates with a decrease in serious worker injuries, but an increase in nontraumatic worker injuries. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the potential effect of unionization on worker injury reporting. The abstract follows.

"Although the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) has always advocated strongly for miners' safety, prior empirical literature contains no evidence that unionization reduced mine injuries or fatalities during the 1970s and 80s. This study uses a more comprehensive dataset and updated methodology to examine the relationship between unionization and underground, bituminous coal mine safety from 1993 to 2010. I find that unionization predicts a substantial and significant decline in traumatic injuries and fatalities, the two measures that I argue are the least prone to reporting bias. These disparities are especially pronounced among larger mines. My best estimates imply that overall, unionization is associated with a 13-30% drop in traumatic injuries and a 28-83% drop in fatalities. Yet unionization also predicts higher total and nontraumatic injuries, suggesting that injury reporting practices differ between union and nonunion mines."