Empirical Legal Studies

CELS 2023--Submission Deadline Extended

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 13-14, 2023

Call for Papers -- Submission Deadline Extension

University of Chicago Law School

The deadline for submitting papers to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) has been extended. The new deadline is Sunday, July 9, 2023 (11:59 PM Central Daylight Time).

Please note that this is the final deadline. The Conference website will not accept submissions after 11:59 PM (CDT) on Sunday, July 9, 2023.

To submit a paper, please visit the CELS 2023 website. We encourage preregistration of all experiments, and we encourage all authors to make their data, scripts, and code publicly available upon publication to the extent your methodology permits. We welcome replication studies and papers that develop and demonstrate empirical methods.

About: The University of Chicago Law School and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 17th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on October 13–14, 2023, in person at the University of Chicago. CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. Visit the conference website.

Questions about the submissions process should be directed to the conference organizers at: [email protected].

Data on Local Prosecutor Campaign Contributions & Electoral Outcomes

Building on prior descriptive work (here) that focuses on local prosecutor elections in the U.S., in a recent paper, Donating to the District Attorney, Carissa Hessick (UNC) et al., broaden their focus to assess how district attorney campaign contributions map onto electoral success. To inform the authors' interest in "the local politics of mass incarceration," the paper exploits a unique data set that links contribution and election results data. Merging these two data sets allows one to know whether a given recipient [local prosecutor candidate] was an "incumbent or challenger, the recipient’s vote share in both the primary and general election, and whether the election was contested in the primary election, the general election, or either election."

Such data provide a "more nuanced picture of prosecutorial politics, allowing us to make important distinctions between offices and interest groups, suggest new accountability measures, and better evaluate how elections can lead to reform." What the authors find propels them to conclude that "accountability mechanisms beyond elections are necessary to ensure prosecutors do not exercise their significant discretionary power unchecked." The paper's excerpted abstract follows.

“… The study offers a more complete empirical account of prosecutor accountability by analyzing contributions to local candidates as well as their election results. It details the amount of money in local prosecutor elections, including from interest groups, and the relationship between candidate fundraising and success. The stark differences across the country underscore that the more than two thousand local prosecutors are not a monolith; some offices are best understood as political, with contested elections and significant amounts of campaigning, while most appear more bureaucratic...”

Judicial Decisionmaking: Moving Beyond Case Outcomes

While conceding that "judges matter" as a general matter, a recent paper, Do Judges Matter?, considers a slightly narrower question: what about judges matters when it comes to the more mundane aspects incident to the business of judging?" More specifically, the authors, Yun-chien Chang (Cornell) and Geoffrey Miller (NYU), explore potential relationships "between a judge’s personal characteristics and the day-to-day business of courts – the writing of opinions, the use of citations, the frequency of dissent, and like factors."

Exploiting a hand-collected data set of 4,591 substantive decisions issued by 48 state supreme courts in 2003 (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), the paper finds that while state supreme courts themselves vary in how they carry out their judicial business (e.g., citation distributions, frequency of dissents), personal characteristics of judges, by contrast, have only a "negligible impact." The abstract follows.

"An extensive literature examines whether characteristics of judges correlate with votes on cases. These studies generally consider the judges’ votes on the merits of cases. Examining a data set of 4,591 decisions issued by 48 state supreme courts in 2003, we consider whether judges’ personal features affect their opinion writing. We find virtually no significant differences along any of the dimensions under review. Judicial characteristics matter only indirectly — ideological differences increase dissensus in public-law cases, which increases opinion length and citation numbers. Our study suggests that when carrying out the ordinary business of courts, judges are almost all the same."

Data on the Fourth Amendment's "Good Faaith" Exception's Application

While the Fourth Amendment is designed to protect criminal defendants against prosecutors' use of unlawfully obtained evidence, an important exception exists for evidence obtained by law enforcement officers who rely in good faith on existing legal authority. Thus, if police rely on a statute that turns out to be unconstitutional or invalid warrants or precedent, the evidence obtained is nonetheless admissible under the good faith exception.

Empirical analyses on how the good faith exception works "on the ground," however, are scant. To this end, a recent paper, The Reality of the Good Faith Exception, by Matthew Tokson (Utah) and Michael Gentithes (Akron), helps to fill a void.

Their paper draws from available published (and unpublished) judicial decisions (N=5,531) that mention the Fourth Amendment or "motion to suppress" across three separate months (July 2015, 2018, and 2021). Among the paper's findings includes a discernible uptick in the exceptions salience over time (see Figure 1, below).

Figure 1: Good Faith Exception (GFE) Prevalence Over Time - Proportion of Fourth Amendment Suppression Cases Involving the Good Faith Exception

The authors are correctly mindful that selection effects certainly influence their descriptive findings. The authors argue that selection effects in this context likely lead, on balance, to an under-counting of suppression hearings to the extent that "defendants and their attorneys likely decline to file suppression motions because of the good faith exception." (emphasis added)

Overall, the paper argues that "the [good faith] exception, originally confined to narrow circumstances, is turning into a protection for nearly any investigatory activity with an arguable connection to an existing precedent or statute" and that "[c]ourts rely on the exception with remarkable frequency, and a large proportion of courts invoking the exception avoid any substantive constitutional ruling, stunting the development of Fourth Amendment doctrine."