Empirical Legal Studies

Not exactly empirical legal studies...

...but pretty cool anyway.  Apropos my own occasional interest in the sport, the New York Times has a story about "alternative baseball universes."

Someone ought to do something similar with (say) the Thomas nomination, to see how (un)likely his confirmation was...

(h/t Slashdot)

New Data: Duration of Capital Appeals

New this week at ICPSR: Multistate Analysis of Time Consumption in Capital Appeals, 1992-2002, by Barry Latzer and James H. G. Cauthen (both of CUNY - John Jay).  The skinny:

Despite public controversy over the length of death penalty appeals, little empirical work has been done on the time allocated to the capital appeals process. The purpose of this study was to perform a multistate empirical analysis of the time expended in direct appeals of capital cases. The researchers included decisions from 14 states that they believed to be representative of the 37 states that have enforceable death penalty laws. For each of the 14 states included in the study, the researchers examined every capital case decided on direct appeal by the courts of last resort between the dates January 1, 1992, and December 31, 2002. The researchers developed a case database by examining a variety of sources. For each of the 1,676 cases in the multistate database, the research team collected time consumption data for each of the following five phases of the direct appeal process: (1) the postsentence stage, (2) the preparation stage, (3) the argument stage, (4) the decision stage, and (5) the supreme court stage. Variables include state, case characteristics, court opinion variables, dates, and time consumption variables.

The states are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

Gibson on Judicial Campaigning

The new American Political Science Review recently arrived and I'd like to call the readership's attention to an article in it by James L. Gibson (Wash U), entitled "Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts:  Legitimacy Theory and "New Style" Judicial Campaigns."   What a timely topic -- judicial campaigning -- as Wisconsin is currently enduring a battle of interest group commercials (complete with dead bodies in them!!) about the state supreme court incumbent and his challenger.  (See FactCheck.org for coverage.)  Does campaigning for judgeships affect the legitimacy of the courts??  See Gibson (he's got lots of other things going on this question as well) for a possible answer, and post here to discuss.

Origins of the P<0.05 (**) "Significance" Threshold Norm

An interesting post (and related bibliography) discusses the historic origins of conventions on social scientific "significance" thresholds (here).

New Release: UCR Crime Data

Over on his blog, Andrew Gelman notes the release of a massive new dataset on crime:

"The time series in question are monthly data from 1960-2004, for over 17,000 police departments, for seven crime types (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, vehicle theft), as well as their sum (the so-called Crime Index), and an additional 19 subcategories – e.g., robbery with a gun, knife, personal weapons (hands, feet, etc.), or other; attempted rape; auto, truck or bus, or other vehicle theft...The data consist of monthly counts of these crimes reported by police departments throughout the country to the FBI as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program."

The data are being made available by Michael Maltz, at Ohio State's Criminal Justice Research Center.  Get them at http://sociology.osu.edu/mdm/UCR1960-2004.zip.  Maltz also makes some great points about the reliability and validity of self-reported crime data; go check it out.

Political Methodology Micro-Conference at Penn State

Organized in part by ELS Blog's very own Chris Zorn, the quantitative social science initiative (QuaSSI), a program in Penn State's political science department, is hosting a conference that should interest many on Sat., May 3, in State College, PA.  Borrowing from the example of several other disciplines, the small conference will showcase research from seven rising scholars of political methodology. Information for anyone interested is found here.

Statistical Displays as Art (Contest)

The applied statistics center at Columbia is sponsoring an inspired contest: 1st Annual Applied Statistics Center Art Contest. Implicitly (if not explicitly) advancing the Tufte legend, I think this is a wonderful idea and hope that legal empiricists will participate. For those interested the submissions deadline is 31 March 2008.

The Elastic Tournament: A Second Transformation of the Big Law Firm

I have been on a blogging hiatus due to a series of projects that have demanded a lot of my time.  This includes work on The Elastic Tournament, which is a paper co-authored with Marc Galanter (Wisconsin Law / LSE).  We presented it last week at a terrific symposium hosted by Stanford Law Review, the Stanford Center on Ethics, and John & Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law.

The paper is largely an update of Marc's famous 1991 book (with Thomas Palay), The Tournament of Lawyer:  The Transformation of the Big Law Firm.   We hope it is the most descriptively accurate account of  modern large law firm, which is, for a variety of reasons, a sector of practice that is of growing importance to law students and law schools.  There is a lot of interested data compiled in this study, which I will be discussing over the next several weeks.  In the meantime, here is the abstract of the article.

In 1991, Galanter and Palay published Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm, which documented the regular and relentless growth of large U.S. law firms. The book advanced several structural and historical factors to explain these patterns, centering on the adoption of the promotion-to-partnership tournament. Systemic changes in the marketplace for corporate legal services in the intervening years suggest the need for an updated account of the modern large law firm.

Using Tournament of Lawyers as a starting point, we propose to fill this void in the literature. Marching through a wide array of empirical evidence covering the last twenty to thirty years, our findings corroborate some of the core theoretical insights of Tournament of Lawyers. For example, the continuous upward growth of the partnership based on the tournament is clearly evidenced by a “smooth” upward trajectory in the partnership ranks while associate hiring hews more closely to the underlying business cycle. On the other hand, the widening ranks of permanent “off track” attorneys and non-equity partners, including the prevalence of de-equitizations, suggest the emergence of a more complex and elongated tournament structure that applies to both partners and associates.

Under a new model, which we dub the “elastic tournament,” the equity core is primarily reserved for partners who control access to key clients. This structure reduces cross-subsidies between lawyers with differential value to the firm, thus reducing the potential for large-scale lateral defections. Yet, this reduced sharing of risks and benefits simultaneously creates an environment in which it becomes more costly—at the individual lawyer level—to faithfully adhere to professional and ethics principles that are in tension with client objectives.  The diminution in sharing also reduces the time horizons of individual lawyers and decreases their willingness to invest in firmwide initiatives that do not simultaneously optimize their own practice. Amidst this widening collective action problem, the “firm” itself has remarkably little autonomy to pursue non-economic objectives, such as racial and gender diversity or the training and mentoring of the next generation of lawyers. Further, except in some exceptional cases, the influence of firm culture, which may have moderated lawyer self-interest in an earlier era, is weakened by the sheer size and geographic dispersion of the modern big law firm.

Although this model is fundamentally “stable” in the economic sense, it raises several philosophical and practical issues regarding lawyer independence and the long-term viability of professional self-regulation.

"Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging"

Christina Boyd, Lee Epstein, and Andrew Martin have been awarded the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the 2007 MPSA annual conference for their paper, "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Based on the numbers on the MPSA website, more than 3,300 papers were eligible for this award.

Here is the abstract:

We enter the debate over the role of sex in judging by addressing the two predominant empirical questions it raises: whether male and female judges decide cases distinctly (individual effects) and whether the presence of a female judge on a panel causes her male colleagues to behave differently (panel effects). We do not, however, rely exclusively on the predominant statistical models - variants of standard regression analysis - to address them. Because these tools alone are ill-suited to the task at hand, we deploy a more appropriate methodology - non-parametric matching - which follows from a formal framework for causal inference.

Applying matching methods to sex discrimination suits resolved in the federal circuits between 1995 and 2002 yields two clear results. First, we observe substantial individual effects: The likelihood of a judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about 10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, we find that men are significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant when a woman serves on the panel. Both effects are so persistent and consistent that they may come as a surprise even to those scholars who have long posited the existence of gendered judging.

The Sweep of Resegregation: K-12 Classroom Teaching

Although much of the attention--historic and current--to school desegregation dwells on students, in a recent interesting paper, Desegregating Teachers, Wendy Parker (Wake Forest) widens the traditional lens by assessing K-12 classroom teacher demographics.  The abstract follows.

"Our public schools are more segregated than is commonly recognized. Through an original empirical study of 157 school districts, this Article uncovers that teachers are re-segregating, just as students are. Many educators, policy makers, and legal scholars would find no fault with this resegregation because they disconnect integration from quality of education. The consequences of teacher segregation, however, remain uncharted territory in this debate over the value of integration. The resegregation of teachers exposes the truth of segregation - it continues to impede structural equality and helps to perpetuate white supremacy. Segregated teaching staffs, which put inexperienced white teachers in minority schools, are but one aspect of the inequality of segregation. Yet, this past term the Supreme Court legitimated the current segregation in our public schools in its landmark opinion, Parents Involved. Our society's refusal to recognize the transformative potential of integration is, however, more of an obstacle to equality than the Supreme Court. That is, until we identify integration with quality of education, the Supreme Court's refusal to do so is unimportant."

Lott v. Levitt - 7th Circuit Brief Now Available

Lott's brief is now available from the Seventh Circuit's website. The brief is here. The appendix is here.

Damage Caps in Med Mal Cases

Caps on non-economic damages persist as a popular tort reform component. What such caps achieve, however, remains understudied. A paper by Hyman (Illinois), Black (Texas), Silver (Texas), and Sage (Texas), Estimating the Effect of Damage Caps in Medical Malpractice Cases: Evidence from Texas, reports results from their study of Texas's 2003 cap on non-economic damages on jury verdicts, post-verdict payouts, and settlements in medical malpractice cases closed during 1988-2004. Critical to this study are the claim-level data that include information on settlements.  An excerpt from the abstract, below, summarizes key findings.

"For pro-plaintiff jury verdicts, the cap affects 47% of verdicts, and reduces mean allowed non-economic damages, mean allowed verdict, and mean payout by 73%, 37%, and 26%, respectively. In total, the non-econ cap reduces adjusted verdicts by $156M, but predicted payouts by only $60M. The impact on payouts is smaller because a substantial portion of the above-cap damage awards were not being paid to begin with. In cases settled without trial, the non-econ cap affects 18% of cases; and reduces predicted mean payout for non-economic damages (predicted mean total payout) by 38% (18%). The non-econ cap has a smaller impact on settled cases than tried cases because settled cases tend to involve smaller payouts."

Charting Pop Songs

Frank Pasquale's post on charting pop songs over at Concurring Opinions surely deserves a plug here.