Empirical Legal Studies

An Updated Database of State Tort Law Reforms (7th)

Ronen Avraham (Tel Aviv Univ./Texas) recently alerted me to an update of one of the more helpful resources around for those who study torts and tort reform. Specifically, the Database of State Tort Law Reforms (7.0), seeks to create "one 'canonized' dataset will increase our understanding of tort reform’s impacts on our lives." A fuller (though excerpted) description follows.

"This This manuscript of the DSTLR (7th) updates the DSTLR (6th) and contains the most detailed, complete and comprehensive legal dataset of the most prevalent tort reforms in the United States between 1980 and 2020.... The dataset records state laws in all fifty states and the District of Columbia over the last several decades. For each reform we record the effective date, a short description of the reform, whether or not the jury is allowed to know about the reform, whether the reform was upheld or struck down by the states’ courts, as well as whether it was amended by the state legislator. "

Data Resources Courtesy of the APSA Law & Courts Section

Our good friends and political science colleagues over at the APSA's Law & Courts Section recently updated the Section's website (click here). What is especially helpful is a sub-page (here) that provides links to the leading court data sets (SCOTUS, CA, district courts, as well as state supreme courts) along with related data assets (e.g., Martin-Quinn Scores, Judicial Common Space Scores).

Matthew McCubbins (1956-2021)

It is with sadness that I note the passing of a friend and colleague Matthew McCubbins.

Bridge Ideal Points--2021 Update

Michael Bailey (Georgetown--Govt.) has updated the Bridge Ideal Points estimates (click here) to cover years 1950 through 2020. These Ideal point estimates include the Supreme Court, presidential, and congressional ideology estimates and are designed to facilitate inter-institutional and cross-temporal comparisons.

While the Bridge Ideal Points compete somewhat with the Martin-Quinn scores in the literature, the two sets of ideology estimates correlate reasonably highly with one another. Despite the overlap, these two ideology estimates differ in two important ways.First, "Bridge Ideal Points are designed to be intertemporally comparable. Martin and Quinn scores assume the ideological cutpoints of Supreme Court cases are drawn from a common distribution across years, which makes them less comparable across time when the case load changes." Second, while Martin and Quinn scores only cover the Supreme Court justices, Bridge Ideal Points for justices are comparable to Bridge Ideal Points for presidents and members of Congress as well.

Regardless of one's preference, efforts to estimate justice ideology remain a staple in the judicial decisionmaking literature.

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society ("JPTOS")--Call For Submissions

The Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society ("JPTOS"), a leading intellectual property law journal for over one hundred years, has recently returned from a publishing hiatus due to the pandemic and is eager to accept new article submissions. Moreover, the Journal’s incoming EIC, Timothy Hsieh (Okla City), a long-time ELS Blog reader, expressly noted that the Journal publishes “a fair amount of articles involving empirical analysis.”

JPTOS seeks articles involving intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, or hybrids between all such forms) or law & technology (blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, social media, privacy/surveillance, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, COVID vaccine patents or patent policy and topics) and all related fields. JPTOS is one of the oldest intellectual property journals in the United States and for over a century has been at the forefront of various intellectual property debates.

Submissions may be directly emailed to: editor@jptos.org (or to the Journal’s Scholastica location: https://jptos.scholasticahq.com/). Additional details regarding submission guidelines can be found at the Journal’s official website (http://jptos.org).

15th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS)

Given the many disruptions incident to the COVID-19 pandemic, I am nothing short of delighted to announce that the Fifteenth Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS), presented by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) and hosted by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (Canada), is now scheduled for Friday, March 18, and Saturday, March 19, 2022.

CELS brings together scholars from an array of fields, including law, economics, political science, psychology, statistics, sociology, history, and policy analysis. 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). The paper submission portal will open August 1, 2021. The deadline for submissions is October 17, 2021.

Of course, while the conference organizers plan on (and sincerely hope for) an in-person event, given the ongoing uncertainties participants are urged to delay purchasing any non-refundable airline tickets at this moment. Additional conference information is found here.

"Results-to-Table" in Stata

While Stata--to my mind, anyway--still has not "fixed" the "unnecessary" degree of complexity in its graphics capabilities, it's nice to see it attend to the critical and often-challenging "results-to-table" migration task in v.17. While some may simply "hand-transcribe" results from the computer screen onto a table created for or embedded into Word documents, the more adventurous likely play with various "outreg" and related commands (e.g., "outreg2"). Stata has recently turned its attention to an alternative (or complementary) approach with updated commands that facilitate users "customizing" table presentations derived from various results. Unlike most efforts thus far, coding for this approach is "native" to Stata. Again, while I'm not entirely sure whether Stata has, once again, made the process unduly complicated, for anyone interested an introductory (and explanatory) video is here.

More Stata Plotting Options

The newly-released subsetplot command produces an array of scatter or other twoway plots for sub-groups of data. As Nick Cox observes (here): "We all know that if you want to compare relationships graphically between groups of observations, we can superimpose different groups in a single plot, or juxtapose different groups in several plots. This [the subsetplot command] is a hybrid approach combining elements of those two strategies."

To illustrate, consider the following plot of auto weight by MPG:The subsetplot command plots these same data across a selected sub-grouping's outcomes (below, by auto repair record groupings (1-5)):For those interested, to download the [Stata] command type:

ssc install subsetplot

6th Annual TAU Workshop for Junior Scholars--Call For Papers (and Optimism)

With the shared hope that some semblance of "healthy normalcy" will return to all sometime soon, I pass along the following Call For Papers.

The Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law is pleased to invite submissions to its sixth junior legal scholar workshop. The workshop provides junior scholars with the opportunity to present and discuss their work, receive meaningful feedback from faculty members and peers, and actively participate in an international community of junior legal scholars.

"The upcoming 2021 TAU workshop for junior scholars in law, which will be held in Tel-Aviv University Law School on November 14-16, 2021, will be dedicated to 'Legal Change in Revolutionary Times.' We are seeking cutting-edge works in progress, in varied legal fields and written from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, that investigate the role of law in revolutionary times, and we welcome works that broadly relate to the core themes of the workshop."

Conference organizers expressly welcomes proposals from: "doctoral candidates, and recent graduates of doctoral programs submissions. Participants from the global South and under-represented communities are particularly encouraged to apply." Paper proposals are due to conference organizers by June 1, 2021. More conference specific information can be found (here); those wishing to contact conference organizers directly can send an email to: TAU.junior.scholars@gmail.com

Finally, conference organizers have adopted an "optimistic" assumption and, at present, anticipate a traditional, "in-person" conference. They also note, however, that if "Covid-19 is till ruling our lives by November 2021," the conference workshop format will transform into a "hybrid-virtual."

Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize -- Update

Each year, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) awards the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Prize for the best poster presented at the Conference. Inasmuch as last year’s Conference was postponed due to the pandemic, this year the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies will award the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize to the best paper submitted to JELS in 2021 and accepted for publication. The prize will be judged by the JELS editors. To honor our late colleague’s strong and enduring interest in mentoring and developing new empirical scholars, we will heavily favor submissions by early-career scholars in making this assessment. We will automatically consider any paper submitted between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021, as eligible for consideration. The award will be noted in the volume in which the article is published and an announcement sent to the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

Another Neat Stata Output "Trick"

A long-time ELS Blog reader, Jeff Yates (SUNY-Binghamton), alerted me to another under-appreciated command that can make life a bit easier for those needing/desiring to convert Stata results into Word docs.  asdoc is a Stata program that makes it easy to send output from Stata to MS Word by creating publication-ready tables from such Stata commands as summarize, correlate, tabstat, cross-tabs, regressions, t-tests, flexible table, as well as others. More information can be found here. To access (or update) the command:

ssc install asdoc, update

JELS' Research Notes and Datasets Section

If memory serves, a suggestion in 2016 (or so) from Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Marty Wells (Cornell-Statistics) to the JELS editors set into motion a chain of events that culminated in 2017 with the introduction of the "Research Notes and Datasets" section in JELS. The core motivation behind introducing a new paper "genre" for JELS was a fundamental belief that dataset construction, data sharing, and methods testing are a vital part of ELS' growth. We felt that a new section in JELS would help contribute to the realization of such beliefs. What we did not fully appreciate or anticipate, however, was the response. Since the Research Notes and Datasets section's launch in 2017 JELS has already published a number of important papers, including:

Patent Similarity Data and Innovation Metrics, by Ryan Whalen Alina Lungeanu Leslie DeChurch Noshir Contractor JELS 2020 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12261

Developing High‐Quality Data Infrastructure for Legal Analytics: Introducing the Israeli Supreme Court Database, by Keren Weinshall Lee Epstein JELS 2020 (June). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12250

The German Federal Courts Dataset 1950–2019: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data, by Hanjo Hamann Sokol JELS 2019 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12230

Competition Law Gone Global: Introducing the Comparative Competition Law and Enforcement Datasets, by Anu Bradford Adam S. Chilton Christopher Megaw Nathaniel Sokol JELS 2019 (June). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12215

Accuracy and Fairness for Juvenile Justice Risk Assessments, by Richard Berk JELS 2019 (March). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12206

Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA)—A Structured Corpus for the Text‐as‐Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements, by Wolfgang Alschner Julia Seiermann Dmitriy Skougarevskiy  JELS 2018 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12189

Medical Liability Insurance Premia: 1990–2016 Dataset, with Literature Review and Summary Information, by Bernard Black Jeanette W. Chung Jeffrey Traczynski Victoria Udalova Sonal Vats, JELS 2017 (March). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12146

A New Tool for Detecting Various Characters in Coding

While a new user-written command, chartab, (briefly described and discussed here) may be criticized as a "command looking for a problem to solve," but for anyone who has ever tried to "de-bug" code a quick tabulation of various "characters" can help identify, and thus solve, problems. These problems include, e.g., the letter l for the number 1; the letter O for the number 0 (zero). These problems typically arise in the context of importing data, especially if it involves string data transited via Microsoft Word or Excel. And anyone merging data based on string variables should probably invest some time in some degree of "Unicode due diligence" before hand to help get in front of any potential problems. To install this command:

ssc install chartab

State Supreme Court Elections Data Set

Judicial decisionmaking scholars comparing outcomes from "elected" and "non-elected" judges invariably turn to state court systems (if the analytic focus is domestic) for the necessary variation. Those turning to the array of state court systems--and the range of state supreme court election types--invariably confront data gathering challenges that materially differ from challenges associated with, e.g., Art. III judges. One of the leading state court scholars, Bert Kritzer (Minn.), continues to make state court election data gathering efforts a bit easier for the rest of us. Not only has Bert engaged in the often under-appreciated yet Herculean effort of original data set building, but he shares his data sets (and associated documentation, codebooks, etc.) with other interested scholars. Bert's most recent updating effort, curated on Harvard's Dataverse, includes a collection of state supreme court election results that now range from 1946 through 2020.

"The archive includes three core datasets plus state-level Excel spreadsheets for all states that employed elections at least part of the time since 1946 to select or retain members of the state supreme court (known New York state as the Court of Appeals) including for Texas and Oklahoma both the state supreme court and the Court of Criminal Appeals which are the final courts for criminal cases in those states."

Those interested in the data sets can click here.

Recent Update for User-Writen "stripplot"

"Longer-time" Stata users may recall (and have used) a user-written graphics command, stripplot. Old and new Stata users, however, should be aware that the stripplot command was recently updated and expanded to allow users to "compare distributions and a variety of displays is possible, including linear and stacked dot and strip plots, with in conjunction box plots or confidence intervals." To illustrate some possibilities, consider, e.g.,:

This facilitates, e.g., a side-by-side display of quantile plots combined with horizontal reference lines for means. For those interested, install with the ssc command. For more information, and examples, click here.