Far too many legal and court scholars (as well as law students, lawyers, judges, etc.) simply assume, at least as a presumptive matter, that court decisions yield the outcomes they seek. Not enough recognize how institutional arrangements, incentives, the "law of unintended consequences," etc., inform how court decisions are implemented "on the ground." A recent paper, An Empirical Assessment of Pretextual Stops and Racial Profiling, by Stephen Rushin (Loyola-Chicago) and Griffin Edwards (UAB-Economics), provides yet another helpful and timely reminder of the efficacy of subjecting formal legal doctrines to data and rigorous research designs.
In their paper the authors exploit a change in Washington State law concerning police traffic stops. While a 1999 Washington State Supreme Court decision (Ladson) barred pretextual traffic stops in 2012 the Washington Court reversed course (Arreola) by permitting "mixed motive" traffic stops. Varying this legal rule opened a door for a DID research design that draws on 8.2M traffic stops in Washington State between 2008 and 2015. And what the results suggest is that the Arreola court decision "was associated with a statistically significant increase in traffic stops and searches of nonwhite drivers relative to white drivers. We find that most of the increase in traffic stop of non-white drivers after Arreola occurred during the daytime, when police officers could more easily ascertain a driver’s race." Overall, this paper will interest not only because of the massive dataset but also for its empirical specification.
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