Empirical Legal Studies

Princeton's LAPA Fellows Program (2014-15)

Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) invites "outstanding faculty members, independent scholars, lawyers, and judges to apply for visiting, residential appointments for the academic year 2014–2015. Successful candidates will devote an academic year in residence at Princeton engaging in their own research and in the intellectual life of the campus.

For 2014-2015, we plan to name up to five general LAPA Fellows, plus one LAPA/Perkins Fellowship in Law and Humanistic Inquiry for scholars at the early stages of their careers. Applicants to the program will be considered for all of the applicable fellowships, depending upon the applicant's proposed research project and qualifications."

While past LAPA Fellows selections tilt towards law and humanities, qualitative, and comparative scholars, LAPA advertises that it includes an interest in, among other areas, “law-related subjects of empirical … significance.”

For those interested, on-line applications can be found here. The application deadline is 5:00 PM (EST) Monday, November 4, 2013.

Effect Size (in Stata)

A recent post on the Stata blog includes a quite helpful explication of effect size, and various measures of it. Effect size is important, in part, because results are often "assessed by statistical significance, usually that the p-value is less than 0.05. P-values and statistical significance, however, don’t tell us anything about practical significance" (emphasis added). The following hypo (from the post) illustrates:

"What if I told you that I had developed a new weight-loss pill and that the difference between the average weight loss for people who took the pill and the those who took a placebo was statistically significant? Would you buy my new pill? If you were overweight, you might reply, 'Of course! I’ll take two bottles and a large order of french fries to go!' Now let me add that the average difference in weight loss was only one pound over the year. Still interested? My results may be statistically significant but they are not practically significant. Or what if I told you that the difference in weight loss was not statistically significant — the p-value was 'only' 0.06 — but the average difference over the year was 20 pounds? You might very well be interested in that pill. The size of the effect tells us about the practical significance. P-values do not assess practical significance."

Finally, one more practical reason to attend to effect size is that a growing (albeit small) number of journals now require reporting it.

Non-Economic Damages in Civil Jury Awards

Drawing from an array of data sources and focusing on civil jury awards, Bert Kritzer (Minn.), Guangya Liu (Duke), and Neil Vidmar (Duke), in An Exploration of 'Non-Economic' Damages in Civil Jury Awards, explore relations between economic and non-economic damages, as well the degree to which the ratio of non-economic-to-economic damages is informed by the maginitude of economic damages. A summary of their key findings follows.

"We found a mixture of consistent and inconsistent patterns across our various datasets. One fairly consistent pattern was the tendency for the ratio of non-economic to economic damages to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. Moreover, the variability of the ratio also tended to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. We found less consistency in our simple regression models where we predicted the log of non-economic damages from the log of economic damages."

An Alternative Explanation for U.S. Prison Growth

John Pfaff (Fordham) continues his mass incarceration series over at PrawfsBlawg with this post on his explanation for prison growth in the U.S. According to John, the “'Standard Story' of prison growth given by academics, policymakers, and the press alike [emphasizing the war on drugs], is basically broken, giving lots of attention to factors that don’t matter that much, and overlooking (if not actively downplaying) the ones that do." Instead, after noting that "prison populations continue to rise even as violent and property crime decline and plateau," John identifies prosecutors as the "primary engine of prison growth, at least since crime began its decline in the early 1990s."

2014 American Psychology/Law Conference -- Call For Papers

Jeremy Blumenthal (Syracuse) asked that I share the following Call For Papers, and I'm delighted to do so.

The upcoming American Psychology/Law Conference in New Orleans, next March 2014, is particularly recruiting legal scholars’ work. All law-and-psychology-related work is welcome, with a separate review process for non-empirical legal work that relates to psychology. An abstract and a 1,000-word summary for individual papers, or a panel of papers with abstracts, is required. Instructions and further conference information are here. And the login page to submit papers is here.

The submission deadline is Sept. 30. Those with any questions/comments should contact Jeremy directly at: [email protected]

Ronald Coase, 1910-2013

A sampling of In Memoriam posts follows: here, here, here, here, and here.

Peer Review & Post-Publication Peer Review

The scholarly peer review process is a human process and thus, by definition, is far from perfect. "Type 1 and 2" errors abound, along with good-faith differences of opinion. Some truly outstanding papers emerge in less-prestigious journals and first class journals sometimes publish truly flawed papers. As Andrew Gelman's (Columbia--Statistics) post helpfully reminds us, however, the "peer review" process hardly ends with publication, especially for empirical work. Indeed, publication can often simply mark the beginning of another, enduring round of "peer reviews," for the better and worse, for journals and authors.