Empirical Legal Studies

CELS 2018 -- Call For Papers Deadline Reminder

As a follow-up to the initial call for papers (here), we want to remind those interested that the 2018 CELS Call For Papers submission deadline is June 22, 2018 (midnight, Eastern Time). As in the past, all paper submissions will be handled via the 2018 CELS Conference page on SSRN (click here to start a submission). Finally, please note that papers are selected through a peer-review process and each is assigned an individual discussant. CELS invites empirical papers that span all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed paper drafts that include main results. Submitted papers must also be unpublished (and are expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

More conference information as well as registration information is found here.

Do Checklists Work?

"Checklists" have long-endured as an inexpensive--and seemingly efficacious--way to reduce risk flowing from tasks requiring complex decision-making. In many complex endeavors--e,g, piloting an aircraft or surgery--checklists are ubiquitous. Indeed, checklists are so pervasive that their efficaciousness is typically assumed or implied.

Exploiting a natural experiment that arose in Seattle and involved state department of health restaurant inspection protocols, in Do Checklists Make a Difference? A Natural Experiment from Food Safety Enforcement (JELS, 15:2) Daniel Ho (Stanford) et al. present results that challenge conventional wisdom. The abstract follows.

"Inspired by Atul Gawande’s bestselling Checklist Manifesto, many commentators have called for checklists to solve complex problems in law and public policy. We study a unique natural experiment to provide the first systematic evidence of checklists in law. In 2005, the Public Health Department of Seattle and King County revised its health code, subjecting half of inspection items to a checklist, with others remaining on a free-form recall basis. Through in-depth qualitative analysis, we identify the subset of code items that remained substantively identical across revisions, and then apply difference-in-differences to isolate the checklist effect in more than 95,000 inspections from 2001--2009. Contrary to scholarly and popular claims that checklists can improve the administration of law, the checklist has no detectable effect on inspector behavior. Making a violation more salient by elevating it from “noncritical” to “critical” status, however, has a pronounced effect. The benefits of checklists alone are considerably overstated."

Lawyers, SEC, and "Revolving Doors"

The impact (real or perceived) of "revolving doors" that link former government employees and private interests raises understandable concerns about "the possibility of regulatory capture—the risk that regulators act 'in the interests of those they regulate.'" Indeed, for many lawyers at the SEC "the revolving door spins rapidly: between 2001 and 2012, 455 former SEC employees disclosed that they intended to represent an external party before the SEC."

While an "impact" on private clients' interests--serviced by former SEC attorneys--has long been assumed, difficulties with careful empirical work in this space are daunting. One immediate difficulty involves the availability of or access to germane data. To this end, a recent paper by Michael Shen (Mich. St.) and Samuel Tan (UC Berkeley--Business), Individual Lawyers, the SEC Revolving Door, and Comment Letters, presents results from hand-collected data on 596 unique combinations of (former SEC) lawyers and law firms that engaged in the SEC comment letter process. What the paper finds, summarized below in the paper's abstract, will surprise few.

"Government officials, advocacy groups, and the business press have raised concerns that former SEC employees may continue to influence the SEC after leaving the agency. Using a hand-collected database of individual lawyers that represent firms in responding to SEC comment letters, we examine the impact of individual lawyers, and lawyers formerly employed by the SEC, on the comment letter process. We document significant differences between lawyers and law firms in their clients’ resistance to SEC comment letters, and find that firms that retain former SEC employees are larger, more profitable, and more likely to have received a comment letter raising accounting issues. After matching on lawyer, comment letter, and firm characteristics, we find evidence consistent with former SEC employees increasing resistance in the comment letter process: conversations involving former SEC employees involve more negotiation, and result in fewer financial statement amendments."