Empirical Legal Studies

The End of an Era: the Bi-Modal Distribution for the Class of 2008

NALP has just posted its entry-level starting salary for class of 2008--i.e., the lawyers who started their jobs just as Bear Sterns and Lehman Bros unraveled and the credit markets completely froze up. 
 
Of the 22,305 law school graduates in NALP's sample (over half of all 2008 graduates), a remarkable 23% (5,130  '08 grads) reported an entry-level salary of $160,000.  In contrast, 42% of entry level lawyers reported salaries in the $40,000 to $65,000 range.  Once again, the central tendencies are a poor guide to the distribution as a whole: whereas the mean salary is a $92,000, the median salary was $72,000.   Further, the two modes ($50,000 and $160,000) are separated by $110,000.

Amidst all the layoffs, deferrals, salary cuts, and apprenticeship programs announced in 2009, it is safe to venture that the bi-modal era has peaked.  Every law school class for the foreseeable future will graduate to a much different economic landscape.  Although many students will regret the opportunity to earn such a big payday upon graduation, it brought with it intense billing pressure, client resentment, heavy leverage, and very little substantive training for new hires.  I would argue that profession as a whole (including current and future graduating classes) is better off with a lower entry level salary. 

Admittedly that is a long-term view for the profession as a whole.  In the short term, current students and recent graduates are in a world of hurt.  Specifically, law school debt loads continue to climb.  Thus, law schools are (rightfully) going to be under increased pressure to deliver value to our students.  I don't think most law professors and law school administrators fully appreciate the difficult times ahead.  For a provocative take on the current state of legal education, see Paul Lippe, Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0.

For some perspective on how this crazy market evolved, see:

• Henderson, Distribution of Starting Salaries for 2006: Best Graphic of the Year (Sept. 4, 2007)
• Henderson, How the Cravath System Created the Bi-Modal Distribution (July 18, 2008)
• Henderson, Class of 2007:  A More Extreme Bi-Modal Distribution (July 30, 2008)
• NALP, A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words (Sept. 2007).

After the jump are the distributions from 1991, 2006, and 2007.  The primary takeaway is that the bi-modal did not exist in the early 1990s.  It first emerged in 2000 (with the dot.com salary wars) and became progressively more extreme starting as the decade unfolded.  On Wednesday, I have an article coming out in the NALP Bulletin, entitled "The Bursting of the Pedigree Bubble," which will provide some additional analysis.

Dependent Data

A nice--albeit somewhat technical--paper (here) underscores an all-too common challenge in empirical legal studies: The perils of serial correlation and the threat it poses to independence assumptions in models.  An excerpted abstract follows.

"In a recent securities law case, the statistical methods used by the regulator in analysing data on daily commissions and hypothetical profits from initial public offerings (IPOs) assumed that the data on consecutive days were independent. Consecutive observations in most business and economic data, however, are positively correlated. While statistical articles demonstrate that this type of dependence affects the distribution of virtually all statistics, including non-parametric and goodness-of-fit tests, the magnitude of the effect may not be fully appreciated. For example, in one comparison of commissions one broker received on days with an IPO to the days when no IPO was issued yielded a statistically significant p-value of 0.02, under the independence assumption. Accounting for serial correlation, the test actually had a non-significant p-value close to 0.09. Other examples of the effect of dependence include jury discrimination cases in locales where grand jurors can serve two consecutive terms as well as cases concerned with environmental pollution where measurements are spatially and temporally correlated. This paper describes the noticeable effect violations of the independence assumption can have on statistical inferences."

ECJ Database

Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas Brunell have posted three data bases, on the activities of the European Court of Justice, and the adjudication of EU law, under Articles 226 (infringement proceedings - brought by the Commission against a Member State), 230 (annulment actions in administrative law brought by individuals and companies against the EU), and 234 (preliminary references from national judges to the ECJ).  They collected these data over the course of 12 years, and they are unavailable outside of the Court, which does not provide public access to them. The home for these data is the Robert Schuman Centre, the European University Institute. The datesets, accompanying codebooks, and papers providing summary analyses of the data can be found here: http://www.eu-newgov.org/datalists/deliverables_detail.asp?Project_ID=26. Since 1996, scholars have used these data in a wide variety of research projects, including doctoral dissertations, books, articles in economics, law, sociology, and political science.

Northwestern Continues to Build Group of Empirical Scholars

To: The Northwestern Law Community
From: David Van Zandt
Re: Bernard Black and Katherine Litvak to Join Northwestern Law

I am pleased to announce that Bernard Black and Katherine Litvak have accepted offers to join our research faculty.

Bernie will officially join the Law School in September 2010 with a joint appointment in the Finance Department at Kellogg.  He will be installed as the first holder of a new professorship in formation between the Law School and Kellogg.  A nationally-recognized expert in corporate law and finance as well as health care regulation, Bernie currently serves as the Hayden W. Head Regents Chair for Faculty Excellence at the University of Texas School of Law, a professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business, and co-director of the Center for Law, Business, and Economics at the University of Texas.  Prior to these appointments, he was the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford, and prior to that, a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, counsel to a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an attorney at Skadden Arps in New York, and a clerk for the Hon. Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  Bernie has also served as a policy advisor to the U.S. government as well as several countries throughout the world, including Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, South Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam.  He has authored or co-authored numerous books and scholarly articles.  Bernie received a BA from Princeton, an MA in physics from Berkeley, and a JD from Stanford Law School. 

Kate joins the Law School this September. Her areas of expertise include venture capital, private equity, corporate and securities law, and corporate finance.  Currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Kate previously served as a clerk for both the Hon. Ralph K. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Hon. Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, as well as a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Columbia Law School.  She has presented at more than 50 national and international conferences, workshops, and seminars.  Kate received her BA from the University of California-Los Angeles, an MA in international relations from Harvard, her JD from Stanford Law School, and also is commencing studies in Kellogg’s PhD program in finance.

I am delighted to welcome both Bernie and Kate to the Law School and thankful to the many members of our community who helped with the hiring and recruitment process.  The addition of these two scholars will further enhance our already strong reputation in the areas of corporate governance and finance.

David E. Van Zandt
Dean
Northwestern University School of Law
375 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
312-503-8460
801-650-6873 (fax)

Pace Environmental Law Review Announces Shift to Peer-Review

An Announcement from Pace:

 Established in 1982, PELR was one of the first scholarly environmental law journals.  As of August 1, 2009, Pace Environmental Law Review (PELR) will use a new Peer Review process to select articles for publication.  Submissions will be reviewed internally and then forwarded to a select group of Peer Reviewers − academics, practitioners, and experts in the field, including members of Pace Law School’s world-renowned environmental law faculty.  The Peer Review process will offer new and distinctive opportunities to foster continued debate and reflection upon some of the most pressing topics within the field of environmental law. Articles selected for publication will benefit from:

 •       Expedited editorial processing of 8 to 10 weeks from acceptance.

 •       Single-article hard copy publication.

 •       Inclusion in a bound volume distributed to PELR’s wide-ranging list of subscribers.

 All articles submitted to PELR must be original scholarship and not previously published.  Exclusive submission not required.  Empirical scholarship very welcome.

 We invite authors to submit articles either via ExpressO or directly in either MSWord or PDF format to the PELR Development & Acquisitions Editor at [email protected].

 For more information, please visit the website at http://www.law.pace.edu/pelr

Call for Papers for "Law Firm Evolution: Brave New World or Business as Usual?"

[posted by Bill Henderson] 

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center has issued a call for paper for a March 2010 conference.  The topic could not be more timely:  Law Firm Evolution: Brave New World or Business as Usual?".  Based on numerous conversation I have had with law firm insiders, my money is definitely on the former.  The full details can be found online here.

When do Presidents Choose "Extreme" Nominees?

One of the questions being pondered this summer by the left side of the legal blogosphere is whether President Obama was wise to choose as his first Supreme Court nominee the apparently more cautious Sonia Sotomayor rather than a "liberal lion" in the mode of William Brennan.  This discussion led me to ask a question of my own: when is a President likely to select an "extreme" nominee rather than a more moderate one?

The below chart uses the Segal/Cover Ideology Scores to explore this question. Jeff Segal and Albert Cover devised these scores by using newspaper reports to measure the perceived ideology of a nominee at the time of his or her nomination. They provide a score for every nominee named between 1937 and 2006.

If we consider an "extremist" to be any nominee falling more than one standard deviation outside of the median, then nominees listed above the first dividing line in the chart are the conservative "extremists", while those below the second line are the liberal "extremists" (remember, the Segal/Cover scores measure perceived ideology at the time of the nomination - which perhaps accounts for Justice Blackmun's score).

The chart does not yield an easy answer to my question, but it does show that at least one frequently told story about extreme nominees is not true: a friendly Senate is no guarantee that a president will choose an extreme nominee. Of the 22 extreme nominations, eleven were made during unified government and eleven during divided government.

	Score	President	Pres	Senate	Vote
D. Ginsburg	0	Reagan	R	D	n/a
Scalia	0	Reagan	R	R	98-0
Carswell	0.04	Nixon	R	D	45-51
Rehnquist, AJ	0.045	Nixon	R	D	68-26
Rehnquist, CJ	0.045	Reagan	R	R	65-33
Bork	0.095	Reagan	R	D	42-58
Alito	0.1	GW Bush	R	R	58-42
Burger	0.115	Nixon	R	D	74-3
Blackmun	0.115	Nixon	R	D	94-0
Roberts, CJ	0.12	GW Bush	R	R	78-22
Haynsworth	0.16	Nixon	R	D	45-55
Thomas	0.16	GHW Bush	R	D	52-48
Powell	0.165	Nixon	R	D	89-1
---------------------	-----------	-------------	-------	-----------	----------
Stevens	0.25	Ford	R	D	98-0
Miers	0.27	GW Bush	R	R	n/a
Burton	0.28	Truman	D	D	Voice
Stone, CJ	0.3	FDR	D	D	Voice
Souter	0.325	GHW Bush	R	D	90-9
Byrnes	0.33	FDR	D	D	Voice
Kennedy	0.365	Reagan	R	D	97-0
O'Connor	0.415	Reagan	R	R	99-0
Breyer	0.475	Clinton	D	D	87-9
Clark	0.5	Truman	D	R	73-8
White	0.5	Kennedy	D	D	Voice
Whittaker	0.5	Eisenhower	R	D	Voice
Frankfurter	0.665	FDR	D	D	Voice
RB Ginsburg	0.68	Clinton	D	D	96-3
Minton	0.72	Truman	D	R	48-46
Reed	0.725	FDR	D	D	Voice
Douglas	0.73	FDR	D	D	Voice
Vinson, CJ	0.75	Truman	D	D	Voice
Warren, CJ	0.75	Eisenhower	R	R	Voice
Stewart	0.75	Eisenhower	R	D	70-17
Goldberg	0.75	Kennedy	D	D	Voice
---------------------	-----------	-------------	-------	-----------	----------
Fortas, CJ	0.845	Johnson	D	D	n/a
Black	0.875	FDR	D	D	63-16
Harlan, John M	0.875	Eisenhower	R	D	71-11
Murphy	1	FDR	D	D	Voice
Jackson	1	FDR	D	D	Voice
Rutledge	1	FDR	D	D	Voice
Brennan	1	Eisenhower	R	D	Voice
Marshall	1	Johnson	D	D	69-11
Fortas	1	Johnson	D	D	Voice

Hello!

Thanks to the Empirical Legal Studies crew for letting me guest blog here. Consistent with the motto of the blog, I hope to use my time with ELS to bring some method to the madness that seems likely to swirl around Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings this summer.

 

For the past two years I have been compiling a dataset capturing all of the statements made by senators and Supreme Court nominees at the confirmation hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The dataset starts with the Felix Frankfurter’s hearing and ends with Justice Alito’s. I have coded by issue area all statements made by the nominees and senators. Each unit of analysis includes information about the political party of the questioning senator, the appointing president, and the committee chair. The dataset also captures instances where a court case was discussed by name, and includes variables indicating whether the statement being coded addressed constitutional interpretation, statutory interpretation, or federalism.

 

I hope to use this data to provide real-time commentary on the confirmation hearings this summer.  Because Supreme Court vacancies occur so infrequently, our discussion of the confirmation process often lacks historical perspective. I hope this data can help rectify that, by bringing concrete information to conversations about what has – and has not – been “the norm” in this process. 

 

I also hope that the ELS community will provide feedback about how to use and improve this dataset. This is in many ways a ‘test run’ of the data, so I look forward to hearing your comments about it. I’m also open to suggestions regarding what type of information you think would be interesting to pull out of the dataset.

 

First up: What makes a confirmation contentious?

Methodological Advances and Empirical Legal Scholarship

I received an email from the Executive Editor of Columbia Law Review's online supplement, Sidebar.  She wrote let us know of a publication of a piece which may be of interest to readers of the Empirical Legal Studies blog. She writes:

 "The piece responds to an article by Professors Cox and Miles on the effect of judicial race and ideology on findings of liability in voting rights cases.  In their response Professors Staudt and VanderWeele argue that because Cox and Miles failed to investigate the possibility of dependencies between the variables they were studying their results may be biased. Staudt and VanderWeele develop an alternative approach for exploring the effects of judicial attributes on voting using causal directed acyclic graphs. They suggest this methodology can help empirical researchers investigate the relationships between variables in order to posit statistical models with appropriate controls and to identify true cause and effect relationships when they exist. While this methodology has become popular in a number of disciplines—including statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and computer science—and is widely believed to be a valuable tool for empirical research, it has yet to appear in the empirical law literature. Staudt and VanderWeele offer a brief introduction of the method in order to initiate discussion as to its worth in empirical legal studies.

 I hope that you will find this piece interesting, and that you will consider linking to it on your blog. I have included a citation and the full link for the online version of the response below.  The piece is also available in a citable PDF version, which can be accessed through a link at the bottom of the response. The piece is also currently featured on the Columbia Law Review home page at http://www.columbialawreview.org."

Nancy C. Staudt & Tyler J. VanderWeele, Methodological Advances and Empirical Legal Scholarship:  A Note on Cox and Miles's Voting Rights Act Study, 109 Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 42 (2009)

 http://columbialawreview.org/articles/methodological-advances-and-empirical-legal-scholarship-a-note-on-cox-and-miles-s-voting-rights-act-study