Empirical Legal Studies

CELS 2025--Save the Date

At the request of the CELS 2025 conference co-organizers, David Hyman, Neel Sukhatme, and Josh Teitelbaum, I am delighted to pass along the following information:

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

24-25 October 2025

 

The 19th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) will be held on 24-25 October 2025, at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

 

More conference information here.

 

CELS 2025 is co-sponsored by Georgetown Law and the SELS.

Public Input Data on SEC Rulemaking

Incident to its rulemaking activities, the SEC, similar to other agencies, solicits public input on proposed rules and reduces to formal memoranda SEC meetings with industry advocates (and lobbyists) seeking to influence final rules. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) enables scholars to assess possible relations between both forms of public input (comments and memoranda) and final rules. And this is precisely what Adam Pritchard (Michigan) et al., set out to do in their recent paper, SEC Rulemaking: An Empirical Analysis of Comments and Memoranda.

The paper draws from 482 rules, 1018 releases, 84,828 comments, and 5,700 memoranda, which are then linked (through Westlaw and Lexis) to any subsequent trial and appellate court activity. These data were then analyzed for "sentiment" with leading LLMs, including OpenAI, specifically GPT-3.5. A focus on rulemaking activity, at least with respect to SEC's proposed rules, is warranted owing to, at the very least, a detectable trend towards increased public commentary over time as the figure (below) implies.

Among this paper's key findings include that while comment volume and sentiment systematically inform final SEC rules, unsurprisingly, this influence varies across different types of commentators. Similarly, direct advocacy engagement with SEC officials--indicated by SEC memoranda--"is an important marker of proposed rules’ adoption, and if adopted, judicial challenge and survival." An excerpted abstract follows.

"... We find that public inputs contain valuable information regarding the probability that a rule is adopted, challenged, and survives judicial scrutiny. Longer average comments and greater disagreement among commenters correlate with a lower likelihood of rule survival, whereas an increase in the number of suggestions correlates with a greater survival likelihood. Rules affecting issuers are less likely to be adopted and more likely to face a court challenge, while rules affecting broker-dealers are more likely to survive judicial scrutiny. As for specific issues, comments emphasizing the burden on competition correlate with a lower likelihood of rule survival, comments raising constitutional questions reduce both the likelihood of rule adoption and survival conditional on a judicial challenge. Comments by academics have no statistically significant effect at any stage of the process...."

14th Annual Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference

Once again hosted at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law, Chicago, IL, the 14th annual summer Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will include distinct--though related--"Main" and "Advanced" workshop sessions.

Main Workshop:  Monday – Friday, July 28-August 1, 2025; Advanced Workshop:  Sunday – Wednesday, August 3-6, 2025.

Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard), Matching and Reweighting Designs for "Pure" Observational Studies: Jens Hainmueller (Stanford), Panel Data and Difference-in-Differences: Jens Hainmueller (Stanford), Regression Discontinuity: Heather Royer (UCSB), and Instrumental Variable Methods: Tymon Sloczynski (Brandeis).

Advanced Workshop Topics/Faculty: Primer on machine learning approaches to prediction: Christian Hansen (Chicago), Applications of machine learning to causal inference:  Christian Hansen (Chicago), Advanced Difference-in Differences: Andrew Goodman-Bacon (Fed. Reserve Bd.), and Advanced Instrumental Variables: Peter Hull (Brown).

In person-registration is limited to 125 participants for each workshop (there will also be a Zoom option as well).

For further information and registration: (click here).