Empirical Legal Studies

District-Level Variation in Social Security Claims' Litigation

Social security claimants' experiences appealing claims can vary considerably across U.S. district courts. Drawing from a dataset of more than 20,000 appeals, Jonah B. Gelbach (Penn.) and David Marcus (Ariz.), in A Study of Social Security Disability Litigation in the Federal Courts, find, in part, that: "District judges in Brooklyn decide these cases pursuant to one set of procedural rules and have in recent years remanded about seventy percent to the agency. Magistrate judges in Little Rock handle this docket with a different set of rules and have in recent years remanded only twenty percent." An excerpted abstract follows.

"Our report makes four contributions. The first is a thorough introduction to the process by which a disability benefits claim proceeds from initial filing to a federal judge’s chambers. This description is intended to deepen understandings of where many of federal civil cases come from, and why they raise the same sorts of concerns repeatedly.

Second, the report provides some context for understanding why the federal courts remand claims to the agency at the rate that they do. We argue that the federal courts and the agency have different institutional goals, commitments, and resources. These differences would cause a sizable number of remands even if the agency adjudicated claims successfully and the federal courts applied the appropriate standard of review. Third, we undertake extensive statistical analysis to try to understand what factors explain the sharp variation in district-level remand rates. Circuit boundaries account for some, but not all, of this disparity. After excluding a number of other potential causes, we hypothesize that district courts remand claims to the agency at different rates in part because uneven adjudication within the agency produces pools of appeals of differing quality. Finally, the report analyzes contrasting procedural rules used by different districts to govern social security litigation. We argue that these differences are unnecessary and create needless inefficiencies. We conclude with a set of recommendations to improve social security litigation within the federal courts."

Discrimination and Local Context--Experimental Evidence from Israel

A young up-and-coming empirical scholar at Hebrew University, Netta Barak-Corren, passed along her summary of a recent paper that considers such questions as: How do social diversity's negative effects distribute? What mechanisms help explain the relationship between diversity and discriminatory behaviors and why do they vary in prevalence and strength across locations? Netta's post follows.

“Folks working on issues related to discrimination and bias might find interest in a recent paper that studied the impact of local context on patterns of discrimination. In Intergroup Behavioral Strategies as Contextually Determined: Experimental Evidence from Israel, Ryan D. Enos and Noam Gidron (Harvard) report the results of multisite lab-in-the-field experiments and survey responses collected across 20 locations. Participants played dictator and public good games against in-group and out-group members.

The researchers found large variation in the extent of discriminatory behavior conditioned on the level of diversity and segregation at each location they studied. The methodological conclusions are particularly interesting. Enos and Gidron demonstrate how 'different conclusions would be reached by locating a study in different locations, even within the same country.' They emphasize the implications for research design: 'Because behavior is a function of context as well as of the players, scholars may observe the operation of different mechanisms depending on the location chosen for research.' For example, they show that researchers may study the same behavior (in-group bias), use the same measures (dictator and public good games), and recruit participants from the same populations and still get substantially different results depending on the location of their lab. Comparing pairs of cities with similar population proportions but different levels of segregation they show that a study conducted in the more segregated city would yield stronger results of in-group bias than the same study conducted in the less segregated city. The authors offer some practical suggested for future experimental studies.”

Patent Appeals After Ebay

The Court's 2006 Ebay decision influenced the availability of injunctive relief in patent cases in important ways. While most empirical assessments of the Ebay decision focus on trial court activity, a recent paper by Ryan Holte (So. Ill.) and Christopher Seaman (W&L), Patent Injunctions on Appeal: An Empirical Study of the Federal Circuit's Application of Ebay, assesses 7.5 years of post-Ebay decisions by the Federal Circuit. An excerpted abstract follows.

"This article represents the first comprehensive empirical study of permanent injunction decisions by the Federal Circuit following eBay. Through an original dataset of appeals in nearly 200 patent cases — representing all cases involving contested permanent injunction decisions for a 7½ year period after eBay — we assess the impact of the Federal Circuit on the availability of permanent injunctions. The findings from this study indicate that the Federal Circuit is generally more favorable to prevailing patentees regarding permanent injunctive relief than the district courts following eBay. District courts that grant an injunction after a finding of liability are highly likely to be affirmed on appeal, whereas district courts that deny an injunction have a statistically significant lower affirmance rate. This suggests the Federal Circuit is generally inclined toward a property rule rather than a liability rule as a remedy against future patent infringement. It also appears to lend support to claims by scholars and others that the Federal Circuit, as a specialized court with a large number of patent cases, is more pro-patentee than the generalist district courts. Finally, some implications of this and other empirical findings from the study are considered."

Jobs: Director of Research, Inst. for the Advancement of the American Legal System

Based at the University of Denver, IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, is a national, independent research center dedicated to facilitating continuous improvement and advancing excellence in the American legal system. The Director of Research is a full time position that reports to the Executive Director. Responsibilities include: Developing a strategic agenda and budget for the research team and monitoring progress with respect to that agenda; Designing research projects, reviewing and digesting existing literature; Implementing research design, consistent with social science expectations and norms; and Supervising research staff in implementation of research design. For more information click here.

Grant Opportunity -- American Psychology-Law Society

The folks at the American Psychology-Law Society (here) recently announced a new grant opportunity for: “research that investigates new or understudied topics in psychology and law, enhances the diversification of psychology and law research through novel theoretical or methodological approaches that are cross-disciplinary in nature, and/or promotes the impact of research by considering novel populations or new problems or processes within the legal system, to include collaboration with practitioners or policymakers.” The particulars on this Request for Grant Proposals are found here. Please note the Nov. 1, 2016, deadline.

Big Data & Algorithms

The move into big data continues to generate an array of legal issues. One such issue involves the various algorithms used to, e.g., determine credit scores, employer resume filtering, and predicting a criminal's likelihood for recidivism. Today's NYT includes an opinion piece (here), written by Julia Angwin, making the case for increased transparency for and access to the underlying data used for algorithmic decisions.