Empirical Legal Studies

Stata Instructional Videos

From the Stata blog: "StataCorp now provides free tutorial videos on StataCorp’s YouTube channel." A direct link to Stata's YouTube "channel" (here). This is, of course, a wonderful move by Stata. While the current collection of videos is limited, more are "forthcoming." My only quibble is that the videos are broken into quite small (and short) discrete sessions (thus far, 24 separate videos accounting for just under 2 hours of instruction). Any quibbles aside, well worth a look.

Big Data -- Georgetown Conference

Josh Teitelbaum (Georgetown) passed along the following conference (set for Mon. Oct. 29) announcement -- focusing on issues incident to "big data." Notably (and helpfully), a video of the conference will be available to those interested yet unable to attend.

Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information: Georgetown Law Library – A Symposium in Celebration of 125 Years

The Georgetown Law Library invites you to a symposium in celebration of its 125th anniversary, Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information, on October 29 at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.

Throughout the day, panelists from the academic, advocacy, government, and library communities will discuss how very large or complex data sets can be used to develop new understandings and inform public policy – connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data to distill meaning in ways impossible a few short years ago. Together, we will share ideas on the theory and practice of balancing privacy costs and public benefit, and the many incentives, practical applications, and new technologies implicated in the growth of big data.

Registration for the symposium is free and open to all, however space is limited. To register and view additional information, please click here.

If you are unable to attend, please note that a video recording will be available at this web address following the event.

Gendered Criminal Sentencing

Noting that "In the United States, men are fifteen times as likely to be incarcerated as women," scholars have wondered whether this difference "can be explained by differences in criminal behavior or circumstances, or are courts or prosecutors treating genuinely equivalent cases differently on the basis of gender?" Given the obvious constitutional implications, reasons for this difference generate important policy and legal interest.

In Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases, Sonja Starr (Michigan) explores reasons for this difference using a dataset that "traces federal criminal cases from arrest through sentencing. I find that gender gaps widen at every stage of the justice process and that men and women ultimately receive dramatically different sentences." An excerpted abstract follows:

"[the paper] finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. Prior studies have reported much smaller sentence gaps because they have ignored the role of charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding in producing sentences. Most studies control for endogenous severity measures that result from these earlier discretionary processes and use samples that have been winnowed by them. I avoid these problems by using a linked dataset tracing cases from arrest through sentencing. Using decomposition methods, I show that most sentence disparity arises from decisions at the earlier stages, and use the rich data to investigate causal theories for these gender gaps."

Title IX, Single-Gender Education Data, and Clever Research Designs

In the complicated (and turbulent) education policy world, policymakers continue to fret over "gendered" outcomes, particularly, of late, in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) context. While such a topic is admittedly layered, research design issues typically frustrate studies of American schools. In Do Single-Sex Schools Enhance Students’ Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Outcomes?, Hyunjoon Park (Penn-Sociology), Jere Behrman (Penn-Econ.), and Jaesung Choi (Penn-Econ.) exploit a unique data set from Korea where students are randomly assigned to either co-ed or single-gender high schools. Also interesting are the study's asymmetric findings. The paper's abstract follows.

"Despite women’s significant improvement in educational attainment, underrepresentation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college majors persists in most countries. We address whether one particular institution – single-sex schools – may enhance female – or male – students’ STEM careers. Exploiting the unique setting in Korea where assignment to all-girls, all-boys or coeducational high schools is random, we move beyond associations to assess causal effects of single-sex schools. We use administrative data on national college entrance mathematics examination scores and a longitudinal survey of high school seniors that provide various STEM outcomes (mathematics and science interest and selfefficacy, expectations of a four-year college attendance and a STEM college major during the high school senior year, and actual attendance at a four-year college and choice of a STEM major two years after high school). We find significantly positive effects of all-boys schools consistently across different STEM outcomes, whereas the positive effect of all-girls schools is only found for mathematics scores."

Med-Mal Tort Reforms & Malpractice Payouts

While attention has focused on state medical malpractice over the years, attention has shifted away from claims against and payouts by physicians and surgeons. A recent paper by Myungho Paik (Northwestern), Bernie Black (Northwestern), and David Hyman (Illinois), The Receding Tide of Medical Malpractice Litigation, exploits the National Practitioner Data Bank and finds that per-physician payouts have fallen 46% below their 1992 level. The abstract follows.

"Tort reform has been a hot issue during the past decade, as malpractice premiums spiked, and state and federal legislators debated the desirability of damages caps. Nine states adopted caps on non-economic or total damages during the period 2003-2006, joining twenty-two states that had previously adopted caps. Great effort has been devoted to studying the impact of these caps, but overall trends in claim rates and payouts have been ignored. Using the National Practitioner Data Bank, we find the frequency of paid medical malpractice claims per physician has been dropping steadily for almost 20 years, and is now less than half the level it was in 1992. Payouts per physician have also been dropping since 2003, and are now 46% below their 1992 level. The decline is largest in states that recently capped total or non-economic damages, but there are also large and sustained declines in states with older damage caps and states with no damage caps. We identify several factors that may partially explain these trends, and suggest possibilities for further research."

More & Updated CELS 2012 Info

Stanford Law School and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies are pleased to announce the 7th annual:

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

November 9-10, 2012

to be held at

Stanford Law School

Conference highlights include:

• Methods lectures by Trevor Hastie on data mining, Douglas Rivers on internet surveys, and Simon Jackman on Bayesian data analysis.
• A Keynote address by Ian Ayres, William K. Townsend Professor of Law, Yale Law School.
• Original empirical legal scholarship by leading scholars from a diverse range of fields.
• Preliminary schedule available here.

Prior to the conference, an (optional) empirical training workshop will be convened by Theodore Eisenberg.

To register and for more information about the conference, visit:

http://cels.stanford.edu

The registration deadline is October 26th.