Empirical Legal Studies

CELS 2024 -- Call For Papers

2024 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

NOVEMBER 8-9, 2024

Call for Papers

Emory University School of Law

The 2024 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) is now accepting submissions. CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

The [Extended] Paper Submission Deadline is Wednesday, July 31, 2024 (11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time). There is no charge for submissions.

To submit a paper, please visit the CELS 2024 paper submission 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.

Papers are selected through a peer review process. If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions. Accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

About: Emory University School of Law and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 18th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on November 8–9, 2024, in-person, at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. 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, statistics, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions.

High Court Data From 'Down Under'

Thanks to Zoe Robinson (ANU) and Patrick Leslie (ANU), a database of all cases decided by the High Court of Australia between 1995 and 2020, is now publicly-accessible (click here). The database was consciously designed to supply data on cases heard by the High Court of Australia as well as the justices that hear the cases and facilitate empirical analyses.

To this end, the database contains "over 315 variables for every case argued before a panel of at least two justices on the Australian High Court between 1995 and 2020, as well as variables on key identity information about the justices hearing the cases. Examples include justice votes, justice coalitions, legal issues in the case, the parties to the case, justices who granted special leave to appeal, justice gender, and justice ideology, amongst many others." Those intrigued might want to skim the dataset's codebook to get a more granular feel for what's included in the data.

Finally, and notably, the researchers strategically constructed the High Court database with an eye towards facilitating comparative work with the U.S. Supreme Court database in terms of variable categorization and naming.

Federal Court Judicial Opinons and Judge Gender

For years (decades, even), legal and political science literatures have considered whether judge gender informs judicial outcomes. While the standard interpretation emphasizes that judicial attributes (including judge gender) play a causal role, an alternative explanation considers the possibility that case characteristics (and therefore potentially outcome) become associated with judicial attributes via some other mechanism, such as case assignment, or decisions about what cases to publish or report.

Results in a recent paper, Gendered Judicial Opinions, by Michael Livermore (UVa) et al., substantially support an assignment/selection pathway explanation. To be sure, the paper is appropriately cautious cautious and notes that while its findings support the assignment/selection pathway, the possibility of a gender causation pathway cannot be properly excluded as the two are not mutually exclusive.

The paper levers a rich data set that includes all federal circuit court opinions, published and unpublished, from 2001 through 2017, except for decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, en banc opinions, and opinions that include fewer than 900 characters. The authors then merged textual data from judicial opinions with judge-level demographic information collected by the Federal Judicial Center (FJC). The paper's abstract follows.

“In this paper we investigate whether gender is associated with the content of judicial opinions in the U.S. courts of appeals. Using a topic model analysis, we find that gender is a significant predictor of the content of judicial opinions. Two causal pathways could explain this result: (1) men and women judges write differently about the same cases; (2) men and women judges write about different cases, either due to assignment or selection effects. To untangle these two pathways, we carry out three additional analyses. First, we examine whether the United States as a party is associated with judge gender. We next examine whether case codes are associated with judge gender. Finally, we examine the relationship between topic prevalence and gender, controlling for case codes. Our findings lend greater support to the second pathway than the first. This result raises the prospect that prior work on gender-based differences in judicial behavior may be confounded by assignment or selection effects. Our results also raise normative concerns about gender disparities in voice and influence in the U.S. courts.”

Regulation & 3rd-Party Litigation Financing

As the world of 3rd-party litigation financing ("LTPF") grows, state efforts to regulate this industry sector endeavor to keep pace. While much of this activity takes place outside of public view, scholarly attention is increasing.

One example includes a recent paper by Ronen Avraham (Tel Aviv, Texas), Anthony Sebok (Cardozo) & Joanna Shepherd (Emory), The Whac-A-Mole Game: An Empirical Analysis of the Regulation of Litigant Third Party Financing. What the paper finds, unsurprisingly, is that as states ramp up regulation on LTPF, funding activity declines; where loosening of state regulations corresponds with increased funding activity.

Another core finding, and inspiration for the paper's title, is that funders continually adjust contract terms in an effort to circumvent regulations. To illustrate, "when legislation prohibits compounding or limits how long funders can charge interest, the funder responds by increasing the posted monthly interest rate. Although these interest rate increases are not enough to completely offset the impact of the other restrictions on the funder’s returns, the funder nevertheless has higher returns than it would have without the attempted circumvention." Thus, akin to the "classic Whac-A-Mole game, funders try to maintain their pre-regulation per-funding-return no matter how states’ regulatory activity tries to get rid of it."

Customizing Stata Tables

While delving into Stata graphics and output (e.g., tables) manipulation is not for the faint-of-heart, as it relates to the latter things recently became a bit easier with Stata's tables command. A three-part video series (click here for Part 1, Part 2; and Part 3) provides some helpful instruction and context. Additional resources also exist (e.g., here and here).