Empirical Legal Studies

Czarnezki in China = Vermont2China Blog

As I mentioned earlier, I'm in China on a Fulbright.  If you're interested in learning of my travels and academic pursuits check out my blog Vermont2China which I will be posting on for the next 10 months.

Statistics Courses, Curricula & Tradeoffs

Over at PrawfsBlawg Jonathan Simon (Berkeley), drawing on his deep reservoir of experience (as an Assoc. Dean in charge of Berkeley's Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program), comments on the challenges incident to building a coherent empirical curriculum into a leading sociolegal & policy program. As is invariably the case, Simon's interesting thoughts on the topic warrant a wide audience.

Post-Trial Relief

Thomas Cohen (BJS) recently circulated an interesting paper that seeks to model decisions to pursue various forms of post trial relief. In When is the Verdict or Judgment Final?: An Examination of Post Trial Activity in Civil Litigation, Cohen's paper exploits a wonderfully rich 2005 BJS civil justice dataset (the most recent addition to a leading collection of civil justice data) and focuses on post-trial activity in state tort and contract litigation. The abstract follows:

"In the civil justice system, there is often an expectation of case resolution with jury and bench trials. The assumption that verdicts or judgments provide an end point to civil disputes, however, does not provide an accurate view of the full civil litigation process. Litigants can file motions requesting various forms of post trial relief as a means of challenging or modifying the trial court verdict or judgment. This article applies multivariate logistic regression techniques to examine the factors associated with post trial activity among a sample of tort and contract trials concluded in the nation’s 75 most populous counties in 2005. Results show that the legal issues adjudicated at trial, the type of trial (bench/jury), damage award amounts, punitive damages, filing to disposition time, and trial length are all significantly associated with the decision of one or both litigants to seek post trial relief."

2010 American Psychology-Law Society Conference: Call for Papers

Jeremy Blumenthal (Syracuse) kindly reminded me that the 2010 AP-LS Annual Conference will be held on March 18-20, 2010, at The Westin Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia.  General conference info is here; more specific submission info is found here. The deadline for submissions is October 5, 2009.

A Pre-1940 Bibliography of Empirical Legal Studies

Herb Kritzer (Minnesotal Law), a seminal figure in the Law & Society movement, has recently posted a paper that provides a very exhaustive survey of emprical legal studies in the pre-1940 era.  His paper, "Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay", includes a full bibliography of the articles he located.  The introduction of paper is worth posting in full:

“Empirical Legal Studies” is a term that began to come into vogue around 2000. ELS built on and extended the law and society (socio-legal studies) approach and the law and economics approach, both of which have strong empirical elements. Of course empirical research on law and legal processes predate law and society and law and economics, with a number of well known studies that were conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s. These mid-century projects include the American jury project (Kalven and Zeisel 1971), the commercial arbitration study (Mentschikoff 1952; Mentschikoff 1961), the court delay study (Zeisel and Callahan 1963; Zeisel, Jr., and Buchholz 1959), the pretrial settlement conference study (Rosenberg 1964), studies of Supreme Court decision making (Kort 1957; Kort 1966; Pritchett 1948; Schubert 1959; Schubert 1963; Schubert 1965; Snyder 1958), studies of the legal profession (Carlin 1962; Carlin 1966; Johnstone and Hopson 1967; Smigel 1964; Zander 1968), studies of compensation for injuries suffered in auto accidents (Connard, Morgan, Pratt, Voltz, and Bombaugh 1964; Hunting and Neuwirth 1962; Linden 1965; Morris and Paul 1962), and studies of the lower courts (Dolbeare 1967; Green 1961; Jacob 1969). Many of these studies of the 1950s and 1960s have framed research agendas that continue to this day. While the mid-century studies are reasonably well-known, much more obscure is the body of research conducted before World War II. In the 1920s and 1930s, and in a few cases even earlier, one can find a wide range of empirically-oriented research on law. The specific topics of this early research include:

• Appellate courts and appellate decision making
• Automobile accident compensation and litigation
• Banking
• Bankruptcy
• Criminal courts
• Debt
• Divorce
• Judicial staffing and judicial selection
• Juries (both petit and grand)
• Jurisdiction
• Legal education
• Legal needs and legal aid
• Legal profession
• Litigation
• Procedure
• Small claims

A significant portion of the early work was linked one way or another to the legal realist movement, and one can find some description of the research in historical treatments of legal realism (Kalman 1986; Schlegel 1980). In significant part because legal realism was essentially an American movement, almost all of the empirical legal research of the period was done by Americans focusing on the United States. The purpose of the discussion that follows is to highlight the range of empirical research on law from the pre-World War II period. To locate that research, I examined the tables of content of all law reviews published prior to 1940, reviewed a large number of English government reports (command papers), and followed up on any citations I could find within those works to other sources. While I do not discuss every study I found, I have provided as complete a bibliography of that research as possible. My discussion of the research is organized around a series of topics. While most studies easily fall within a single topic, a few stretch across multiple topics, and appear more than once.

The State of Empirical Health Law Scholarship

A wonderfully informative piece by Michelle Mello (Harvard) and Kathryn Zeiler (Georgetown Law), Empirical Health Law Scholarship: The State of the Field, does just what it sets out to accomplish as it takes stock of the growing sub-field. From the abstract:

"... describing commonly used methods, analyzing enabling and inhibiting factors in the production and uptake of this type of research by policymakers, and suggesting ways to increase the production and impact of empirical health law studies. In some areas of inquiry, high-quality research has been conducted, and the findings have been successfully imported into policy debates and used to inform evidence-based lawmaking. In other areas, the level of rigor has been uneven, and the best evidence has not translated effectively into sound policy. Despite challenges and historical shortcomings, empirical health law studies can and should have a substantial impact on regulations designed to improve public safety, increase both access to and quality of health care, and foster technological innovation."