Empirical Legal Studies

A Practice Worth Replicating

The good folks over at the Social Science Statistics Blog posted a recent presentation from the Applied Statistics workshop at Harvard. In it, Prof. Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak discusses propensity score matching at the CDC (approx. time: 75 minutes).

Modeling Judicial Dissents

Judicial decision-making scholars will want to see Why (and When) Judges Dissent: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, by Lee Epstein (Northwestern), Bill Landes (Chicago), and Richard Posner (CA7 & Chicago). In it, the authors "develops and tests a model of self-interested judicial behavior to explore the phenomenon of judicial dissents, and in particular what we call 'dissent aversion,' which sometimes causes a judge not to dissent even when he disagrees with the majority opinion." An excerpted abstract follows.

"... In the court of appeals, the frequency of dissents is negatively related to the caseload and positively related to ideological diversity among judges in the circuit and circuit size (i.e., the fewer the judges, the greater the collegiality costs of dissenting and therefore, other things being equal, the fewer dissents). We also find that dissents increase the length of majority opinions (imposing collegiality costs by making the majority work harder) and are rarely cited either inside or outside the circuit (reducing the value of dissenting to dissenters). In the Supreme Court, we find that the dissent rate is negatively related to the caseload and positively related to ideological differences, that majority opinions are longer when there is a dissent and that dissents are rarely cited in either the courts of appeals or the Supreme Court."

Call For Proposals -- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Public Health Law Research Program (PHLR)

A new call for proposals (CFP) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Public Health Law Research Program (PHLR) has been released today.  The CFP is available at www.publichealthlawresearch.org
 
While PHLR funds studies that mainly focus on the intersection of law and public health, researchers from other disciplines, such as medicine, economics, sociology, psychology, public policy and public administration are encouraged to be part of multi-disciplinary teams of applicants. Research teams that include government agencies, community organizations, and advocacy and policy related groups are especially encouraged to apply.
 
This year's CFP will have about $3.5 million available for funding studies at two levels.  Short-term studies will be funded up to $150,000 each for up to 18 months, while complex and comprehensive legal and public health studies will be funded up to $450,000 each for up to 30 months. The deadline for submitting brief proposals is April 14, 2010.

A press release can be found at:
http://publichealthlawresearch.org/news/new-call-proposals-issued-public-health-law-research-program

Why Judges Do What They Do

Stephen Choi (NYU), Mitu Gulati (Duke), and Eric Posner (Chicago), in What Do Federal District Judges Want? An Analysis of Publications, Citations, and Reversals, bring data to bear on the question of judge motives when it comes to opinion writing. From the abstract:

"We report evidence from a dataset of federal district judges from 2001 to 2002 that district judges adjust their opinion-writing practices to minimize their workload while maximizing their reputation and chance for elevation to a higher court. District judges in circuits with politically uniform circuit judges are better able to predict what opinions will get affirmed by the circuit court, leading to higher publication rates and a higher affirmance rate. In contrast, district judges in circuits with politically diverse circuit judges are less able to predict the preferences of the reviewing circuit court panel, leading district judges to publish fewer but higher quality opinions in an effort to maximize their affirmance rate."

Defining "Natural Experiments"

Nice discussion (via the Social Science Statistics Blog) here.