Empirical Legal Studies

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (for ELS)

Andrew Gelman (Stats & Poli Sci; Columbia), who delivered a wonderful paper at the recent CELS conference, followed up with a recent post on graphical communication for empirical legal scholarship. As you will see, Andrew's post pivots on a thoughtful comment from Dan Kahan (Yale).

Double-Blind Research Design & Expensive Violins

While not particularly legal per se, results from a test of professional violinists' ability to identify music from a Stradivarius as opposed to other and newer, expensive violins, originally published in The Strad (Feb. 2007), were featured in a recent NPR segment (here). (The NPR segment includes two audio clips for anyone interested and desiring to test their own musical acumen.)

Notably (and certainly within the ELS Blog sweet-spot), the researchers employed a double-blind test. "Researchers gathered professional violinists in a hotel room in Indianapolis. They had six violins — two Strads, a Guarneri and three modern instruments. Everybody wore dark goggles so they couldn't see which violin was which." Ironically, "the only statistically obvious trend in the choices was that one of the Stradivarius violins was the least favorite, and one of the modern instruments was slightly favored."

Adjusted Predictions and Marginal Effects Resource

On the Stata listserv I recently stumbled across a resource (here) for anyone looking for a helpful "how-to" explanation of Stata's margins command and the resulting adjusted predictions and marginal effects output. Credit goes to Richard Williams, a sociologist at Notre Dame for sharing his slides.

Content Analysis

Dan Katz (MSU) let me know about a beta release of new website, Legal Language Explorer, that will likely interest anyone who does content analysis as well as those looking for a neat (and, according to Jason Mazzone, addictive) toy to burn some time. The site, according to Dan, allows users: "the chance [free of charge] to search the history of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005) for any phrase and get a frequency plot and the full text case results for that phrase." Dan also reports that the developers hope to expand coverage beyond Supreme Court decisions in the future.

Getting Underneath Data and Results

Over the years I have repeatedly emphasized to my students in empirical methods classes of the need to "get underneath" the data and results, particularly for secondary analyses. By that I mean researchers invariably benefit from on-the-ground insights into and outside perspectives on what their data (and research design) actually capture and results suggest. Kyle Graham's helpful post over at Concurring Opinion illustrates how this general point can work when evaluating a possible empirical project.

Legal Scholarship Network

Legal Scholarship Network Professional Announcements and Job Openings December 7, 2011 Published by the LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP NETWORK (LSN) a division of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. (SSEP) Copyright by SSEP, Inc. 2011 -- All rights reserved. tomorrow's

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NSF Law & Social Sciences Program: New Funding Solicitation and Dear Colleague Letter

The Law & Social Sciences (LSS) Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) is pleased to announce the release of a new funding solicitation (here) and an associated Dear Colleague Letter (here).

ABOUT THE LSS PROGRAM: The LSS program supports social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules. Successful proposals describe research that advances scientific theory and understanding of the connections between law or legal processes and human behavior. The program funds the best proposals submitted within the field broadly defined, regardless of specific subfield, and strives to support an interdisciplinary community of scholars studying relevant topics. Fields of study include many disciplines (including anthropology, communication, criminology, economics, legal scholarship, political science, public policy, psychology, and sociology), and often address significant problems including though not limited to: Crime, Violence and Punishment; Economic Issues; Governance; Legal Decision Making; Legal Mobilization and Conceptions of Justice; and Litigation and the Legal Profession.

The LSS program offers several modes of funding, including support for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and research faculty in both the social science and law school academies. The program is particularly interested in enhancing its support of JD/PhD scholars in the law school academy, as outlined in the Dear Colleague Letter referenced above and detailed on the LSS program website.

SUBMISSIONS/FURTHER INFORMATION: Questions regarding the LSS program or proposal submissions may be directed to the program officers, Dr. Christian Meissner (at: cmeissne@nsf.gov) or Dr. Susan Sterett (at: ssterett@nsf.gov).

Influence of Mandatory and Discretionary Court Dockets on Case Outcomes

In an intriguing paper forthcoming in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2012), Does the Judge Matter? Exploiting Random Assignment on a Court of Last Resort to Assess Judge and Case Selection Effects, Ted Eisenberg (Cornell), Talia Fisher (Tel Aviv), and Issachar Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv), exploit a database of criminal cases appealed to the Israel Supreme Court. In the course of seeking to assess individual judge effects on case outcomes, and controlling for the usual complexities that contribute to non-random case assignment to justices, the authors lever a factor that distinguishes the Supreme Courts in Israel and the U.S. Specifically, the Israel Supreme Court's docket includes an important cohort of mandatory cases. The paper notes how "studies limited to discretionary jurisdiction case outcomes can distort perceptions of judges’ preferences." The abstract follows.

"We study 1410 criminal law cases appealed to the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 to assess influences on case outcomes. A methodological innovation is accounting for factors — case specialization, seniority, and workload — that modify random case assignment. To the extent one accounts for nonrandom assignment, one can infer that case outcome differences are judge effects. Individual justices cast 3986 votes and differed by as much as 15 percent in the probability of casting a vote favoring defendants. Female justices were about two to three percent more likely than male justices to vote for defendants but this effect is sensitive to including one justice. Defendant gender was associated with outcome, with female defendants about 17 percent more likely than male defendants to receive a favorable vote on appeal. Our data’s full samples of mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases allow us to show that studies limited to discretionary jurisdiction case outcomes can distort perceptions of judges’ preferences. Justices’ ordinal rank in rate of voting for defendants or the State was uncorrelated across mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases. For example, the justice who sat on the most criminal cases was the fourth (of 16 justices) most favorable to the State in mandatory jurisdiction cases but the twelfth most favorable in discretionary jurisdiction cases. This result casts doubt on studies of judges on discretionary jurisdiction courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, in which votes in the selection process are not observed."

Criminal Sentencing, Booker, and IP Cases

Owing to external shocks, such as the Booker decision, U.S. Sentencing Guidelines panel data provide a number of research opportunities. In an accessible paper, Post-Booker Judicial Discretion and Sentencing Trends in Criminal Intellectual Property Cases: Empirical Analysis and Societal Implications, Aaron Rabinowitz (Temple) assesses Booker's influence on sentencing for IP convictions. A summary of the paper's findings, from an excerpted abstract, follow.

"... [T]hat sentences imposed on intellectual property offenders deviate from the advisory Guidelines in two out of every three cases; prosecutors seek and judges reduce sentences for intellectual property crimes more frequently than for other comparable crimes; and judge-initiated deviations occur after Booker about twice as frequently for intellectual property offenders than for other offenders, whereas such judge-initiated deviations before Booker occurred less frequently than for crimes in general or for other economic crimes."

An Argument For Using Poisson (With Examples)

While wanting to avoid igniting something of a statistical holy war, I did want to point to an argument from the good folks at Stata for using poisson over log-linear regression  (and negative binomial regression) in some cases. The post (here) quite helpfully includes suggested code as well as Stata output illustrations.

Fantasy SCOTUS

Greg Mitchell (UVa) encourages folks to participate in FantasySCOTUS, a project co-sponsored by the Harlan Institute and UVa. In exchange for playing, paprticipants earn a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift certificate each month.