Empirical Legal Studies

Case Coding by Students or Faculty

This is the last of our series of five installments on content analysis of judicial opinions, which we hope prove to be useful for those who want to undertake or refine this method down the road.

 

A major advantage of content analysis is the ability to delegate much of the grunt work to student coders.  But our experience, and that of some others we’ve heard from, is that students can be dangerously prone to errors or misunderstandings.  Avoiding these requires laborious stages of piloting, training, documentation, and double-coding.  Is this worth the effort?  Fewer than a quarter of the 125 projects we reviewed used student coders primarily; in the rest, the authors appeared to do their own coding.

 

Our view is that student coders should be used when this adds value and not just to save effort.  In other words, sometimes students can do a better job than faculty can on their own.  Here’s why.

 

Realize, first, that the methodologic purpose of content analysis is to bring scientific objectivity to a reading of cases.  If that isn’t your purpose, then why bother?  The method’s scientific rigor arises from the replicability of coding, which should be demonstrated rather than presumed.  This usually requires double-coding to show inter-coder reliability (or consistency) – i.e., that different readers would find the same content you found. But, it can be difficult for non-expert student coders to agree on the more legally-relevant content of cases.  Faculty coding may be essential when analyzing more subtle, latent, or judgmental -- i.e., more interesting -- aspects of cases. 

 

The reliability problem isn’t solved, however, simply by shifting to faculty coding.  Just because you’re an expert, your coding is no more self-validating than is a student’s.  That’s why, from a scientific point of view, coding by 3 students is more rigorous than coding by the single greatest scholar in the world.  To demonstrate replicability, faculty who do their own coding should also have some of it double-coded independently, perhaps by a similarly-expert colleague.  But, when the subject matter allows for student coding, that may be a better way to go, both for reasons of expediency and reliability.

Selection Troubles in Content Analysis

This is the latest installment in a blog forum on Content Analysis, as applied to the content of judicial opinions.

After Mark and I collected 125 examples of content analysis, we evaluated how well scholars used this technique over the years. As you might expect, authors of the studies have paid attention to the selection of judicial opinions for study. But we think authors are worried about the wrong selection problem: it is common to see discussions of selection bias, instead of more troublesome issues of selection replicability.

Many scholars over the years have discussed selection bias. They wonder if the published opinions they reviewed were typical of the entire pool of written judicial opinions; whether the chosen opinions were typical of judicial decisions more generally; whether the chosen opinions were typical of litigated cases; whether the chosen opinions were typical of underlying legal problems in the world. The connection gets weaker at every step, but you saw that one coming, right?

The proper inferences to draw from a collection of cases must account for these gaps. Still, the selection bias problem is actually smaller for judicial opinions than for many other texts to be studied through content analysis -- the number of relevant opinions is often small enough that the author can code the entire relevant universe.

A selection issue that get much less attention, however, is selection replicability. Most often, these content analysis projects describe the general search criteria that the authors used to identify cases, and just stop there. A smaller group specify the sources searched (e.g., West Decennial Digests for older projects, designated LEXIS/Westlaw databases for newer projects). A small number of projects list the actual Westlaw/LEXIS search terms used. A surprising number of the projects simply listed the cases that were included in the study.

All too often, the description of the case selection method was too sketchy to allow another researcher to replicate the same results. (A simple listing of the cases doesn't exactly do the job.) That basic building block of the scientific method -- replicability -- deserves more attention than the now well-known potential biases that flow from studying the world through a collection of judicial opinions.

It's a important shift in thinking that still hasn't percolated down very far into the legal academic ground.

Good and Bad Uses of Content Analysis

We are not proselytizers of content analysis.  It has certain advantages in legal studies, but also substantial limitations, compared with conventional legal analysis.  A full exegesis would take a dissertation (at least), but here are a few summary thoughts.

We think the most successful applications have been those that:

• Debunk conventional wisdom by showing that widely-held beliefs are descriptively wrong about what’s actually in the caselaw.
• Describe the landscape of a body of caselaw, much like a naturalist might explore a new continent or even a familiar patch of woods, by turning over stones and carefully documenting what crawls out.
• Use regression analysis to uncover hidden patterns in complex fact-specific areas of law
• Study particular techniques of opinion-writing, such as syntax, semantics, citations, or reasoning style.

These applications put content analysis to its best use in legal studies because they highlight the empirical weaknesses of traditional legal methods, and they focus on aspects of opinions that are objective and primarily descriptive.

Less successful, or potentially misapplied, uses are those that try to:

• Predict the outcome of future cases as practicing lawyers might do
• Explain definitively what legal or factual elements cause courts to rule one way or the other
• Bring the appearance of scientific rigor to a normative critique of the law (e.g., to show that courts got it wrong/right or made bad/good law)

The primary problem in the first two on this “bad” list is the inherent bias and circularity (or “endogeneity”, as social scientists would say) in how factual elements are reported in opinions.  Our skepticism is not to disbelieve judges when they give us the reasons for their decision.  Instead, we question whether factual and legal elements can be cleanly separated looking only at an appellate decision.  Also, we doubt that the facts reported are reliable guides to real-world facts because of how they are filtered and distorted by the litigation process.

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Do you agree that the first batch of purposes is each a legitimate use of content analysis?  Would you like to defend any of the second batch of questionable uses?

Non-PhDs and Content Analysis -- Learning Social Science on the Fly

Are ordinary law professors as well-equipped as PhD social scientists to carry out content analysis of judicial opinions? There are reasons to think that they might not be. Content analysis, after all, is a standard technique used in communications, political science, sociology, and other disciplines. It is a common part of the methodological training of social scientists. Legal scholars, meanwhile, often “discover” the techniques of content analysis during research, intuiting many of its essential components on the fly.

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On the other hand, there are reasons to think that non-PhD legal scholars could do content analysis reasonably well, even without formal training. In some ways, the method resembles the traditional lawyerly job of reading opinions and trying to evaluate them by using consistent criteria.

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So which is it? Does PhD training matter in the execution of content analysis?

• First, a word about trends over time. About two-thirds of the 125 studies we located from the past half-century include a PhD author.  Surprisingly, this ratio has not increased in recent years, despite changes in the composition of law school faculties.
• Second, the presence of PhD authors does make a difference in citations to methodological literature. Among the PhD-authored studies, three quarters cited to methodology literature, compared to half of the non-PhD-authored studies.
• Third (and this surprised us), the presence of PhD authors did not make much difference in efforts to demonstrate coder reliability. While it was predictable that 71% of the non-PhD studies included no discussion of coder reliability (such as measuring consistency among coders), fully 62% of the PhD studies also included no discussion of coder reliability. The non-PhD studies used student coders 40% of the time, while the PhD studies used student coders 34% of the time.
• Finally, the studies by PhD authors did tend to use statistical techniques more often to analyze the coded results. About two-thirds of the PhD studies used multiple regression analysis, compared to 40% of the non-PhD studies.

How would you expect PhD-authored studies to differ from those conducted by authors with legal training only?

Content Analysis of Judicial Opinions

We (Mark Hall and Ron Wright at Wake Forest) have been asked to host a discussion forum this week on using systematic content analysis to study the legal content of judicial opinions. If any empirical method is especially well-suited to legal studies, surely it is content analysis since this is the established scientific method for reading any type of text.  Most of us are familiar with several good examples that apply this method to law cases.  But, until we started looking systematically and keeping track -- i.e., doing a content analysis of content analyses -- we had no idea how much this was being done, and for how long.

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Take a wild guess:  How many published projects use systematic coding to study the legal or factual content of judicial opinions?  To keep you reading, the answer is at the end.  (Teaser: It’s more than a couple dozen.)  And, what are the largest such studies, when were they first done, and who has done this the most?  (Hint: Cornell is not in any of these answers.)

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We don’t include the many fine examples of “docket analysis,” which code only for information obtained from docket sheets or brief abstracts (subject matter, parties, outcome).  We also don’t include the many interesting studies of courts’ citation patterns.  Instead, we’re interested in research projects that code cases for the same material used in traditional interpretive legal methods:  facts, law, or judicial reasoning.

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(Drum roll) And the answers are:

• There are 125 distinct coding projects (some with many publications)
• The first was published in the 1957 by political scientist Fred Kort
• The rate jumped from <1/yr before1990, to >6/yr since 1990
• The largest are the State Supreme Court Database (Brace & Hall) and the Court of Appeals Database (Songer).  Each has over 20,000 cases.
• The longest is the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database (Harold  Spaeth), which began in the mid-1980s and is still ongoing (9000 opinions)
• Karl Llewellyn (1960) and Richard Posner (1972) were among the early users of this method
• The most frequent content analyst is Willy E. Rice at St. Mary’s (8 projects).

For more detail, see Systematic Content Analysis of Judicial Opinions.

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Tomorrow, we summarize how much of this work is being done by law professors vs. Ph.D. scientists.  For now, let us know what you think: Are you surprised by how often content analysis is being used to study the legal content of cases?  And, why do you think this method has catapulted since 1990?

Great Moments in the History of Ignorance & Division IV

Again moving forward through time, today’s fourth and final Great Moment comes from the 1960s, a bit of doom and gloom about the state of public law and legal education. Admittedly, it’s not all bad in this period. In the mid-1960s the Harvard Law Review published a symposium with contributions from five political scientists and a response from Lon Fuller. See Joel B. Grossman et al., A Symposium: Social Science Approaches to the Judicial Process, 79 Harv. L. Rev. 1551-1628 (1965-1966). But this effort at bridge-building seems overshadowed by the extent of the divide between students of judicial behavior and students of legal doctrine. Glendon Schubert elaborates in a thorough discussion of the development and decline of public law as a field. He even offers a few suggestions for making public law in law schools “less ghastly.” Glendon Schubert, The Future of Public Law, 34 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 593, 614 (1965-1966).

Schubert, whom Jeffrey Segal describes as the “founder of the attitudinal model,” provides many gems in this article. See Jeffrey A. Segal, Glendon Schubert: The Judicial Mind, in The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior 78, 78 (Nancy Maveety ed. 2003). Here are three:

To be perfectly blunt, legal research remains today at the primitive level of development, as a science, that generally characterized political science one or two generations ago. By and large, legal method is no more in phase with modern science than it was in the days of Austin, or (better) Aquinas, or (best) Aristotle, all of the talk about “legal science” and computerized methods of retrieving legal data to the contrary notwithstanding.

Schubert, supra, at 600.

Great Moments in the History of Ignorance & Division III

I started with Frank Goodnow’s 1904 presidential address at the first annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Today’s Great Moment comes from Charles Grove Haines’ 1940 presidential address at the APSA’s 35th annual meeting. Haines was one of Goodnow’s students, and like Goodnow, one of the great public law scholars. See Glendon Schubert, The Future of Public Law, 34 Geo. Wash.L. Rev. 593, 603 (1965-1966). In this excerpt, Haines describes the growing divide between law and political science:

In the early years, when political science was becoming a separate and independent field among the social sciences, public law, a subject at this time accorded little attention in the curricula of law schools, was for many of the members of the new organization one of the major lines of interest. Gradually the scope of work coming within the ambit of the American Political Science Association has been broadened and enriched by the exploration, analysis, and interpretation of other phases of political ideas and phenomena, with the result that political science may truly be regarded as no longer under the bondage of the lawyers. On the other hand, public law has now become one of the important subjects of instruction in law school curricula, and with this trend has come a decline of the importance of this field of instruction in departments of political science. In fact, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that there are some who maintain that the only deserving place for public law courses in which the case method of instruction is used is in the law schools. In my opinion, such views are incompatible with the best interests of legal instruction both in the law schools and in departments of political science. Public law always has been and continues to be primarily public in its nature, significance, and implications. It belongs, therefore, as much to the field of the political and social sciences as it does to the field of the law, and political and social scientists as well as lawyers may well cooperate in the consideration and evaluation of the vital problems involved in its development.

Charles Grove Haines, The Adaptation of Administrative Law and Procedure to Constitutional Theories and Principles, 34 Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev. 1, 27 (1940) (emphasis added).

Tomorrow’s Final and Really Great Moment: Glendon Schubert describes legal research as “primitive,” explains why political scientists started ignoring their public law colleagues, and calls the study of public law in law schools “ghastly.”

Solum on Interdisciplinary Ignorance

Over at the Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum has a response to Frank Cross’ post on interdisciplinary ignorance. One of his conclusions: “[T]he legal academy continues to reinforce interdisciplinary ignorance. As a profession, we are failing badly in the training of future legal academics.”

UPDATE: Daniel Solove at Concurring Opinions responds to Solum responding to Cross.

UPDATE II: Mark Graber posts. And Mark Tushnet reacts.

Great Moments in the History of Ignorance & Division II

While teaching at Harvard in the early 1930s, Hugh Langdon Elsbree published a book entitled, Interstate Transmission of Electric Power: A Study in the Conflict of State and Federal Jurisdictions (Harvard 1931). Elsbree later served as the director of the Legislative Reference Service, the precursor to the Congressional Research Service. He died just two years ago, at age 100.

The relevance of Elsbree and his book is that Felix Frankfurter reviewed it for the Harvard Law Review, and in doing so, he offered some thoughts on the great divide. Frankfurter was not terribly enthusiastic about the book, complaining that Elsbree was “too awed by judicial language.” Felix Frankfurter, Book Review, 45 Harv. L. Rev. 762, 763 (1931-1932). Frankfurter was also unhappy with political scientists and economists in general. He argued that they should attend to their own responsibilities rather than those of lawyers. So here is today’s Great Moment in the History of Ignorance and Division, a call for more division:

Economists and political scientists rightly criticize law and lawyers for their formalism. Legal decisions, say our critics, are too often exercises in dialectic, and do not grow out of the soil of life. This charge finds deep sympathy in my breast. But an even greater dissatisfaction that I have with American public law decisions is the snake-like fascination that their sterile dialectic exercises over economists and political scientists. We lawyers are dependent upon these specialists for a critique of the economic, social, and political assumptions which so often underlie what purport to be technical legal doctrines. Yet, more often than not, instead of subjecting such decisions to the test of economic and political fact and wisdom, the economists and political scientists are subdued by the materials of the law and themselves become legal dialecticians.... What we have a right to expect from economists and political scientists is an analysis of what the true governmental problems are, in the light of what actually goes on in the world and wholly apart from the technicalities of American constitutional law. Only after we have such an analysis is it the function of the American lawyer either to find within the existing body of law resources adequate to reconcile law with wisdom, or, if that reconciliation is impossible, to fashion new law. Until the economists and political scientists attend to their special tasks and we lawyers to ours and each has an awareness of the others’ problems, we shall continue to have what Alvin Johnson calls the cross-sterilization of the social disciplines.

Id. at 763-64.

Tomorrow’s Great Moment: Charles Haines, another past president of the APSA, declares that political science is “no longer under the bondage of the lawyers.”

*For more on Elsbree, here are page 1 and page 2 of the tribute offered to him by Representative Robert Ney in the Congressional Record.

Great Moments in the History of Ignorance & Division I

This week, I’ll offer some historical highlights on the current blog forum topic, the divide between law and political science. I’ll rely first on Frank Goodnow (1859-1939) for some thoughts on the relationship between the two disciplines at the turn of the century, a time when there was much less division.

Goodnow, the APSA’s first president, was a member of the Department of Public Law and Jurisprudence at Columbia. Along with John Burgess, Munroe Smith, and John Bassett Moore, he was one of the leading members of the department. Like Goodnow, Smith and Moore served as APSA presidents. And all four held joint appointments in the law school. During this early period of organized political science, public law courses were often of greater interest to political scientists than law professors, and for a time, these four taught the only courses in the law school on constitutional law, administrative law, international law, and even Roman law. See Glendon Schubert, The Future of Public Law, 34 Geo. Wash.L. Rev. 593, 594 (1965-1966).

In the first presidential address to the APSA in 1904, Goodnow discussed the subject matter of political science, including one of the “most important” subjects, public law. So how would law be studied by political scientists? How would it be different than the study of law by lawyers? According to Goodnow:

Unless we conceive of all law as a part of Political Science, it becomes necessary then to differentiate Political Science from legal science. Strictly speaking, of course all law which does not affect the relations of the State and its officers is to be assigned to legal rather than to Political Science.... But it is none the less true that a knowledge of the private law is necessary to one who would understand the methods and operations of what are known as political bodies. Furthermore, the points of contact between the private and the public law are so many and the contact is often so close that a knowledge of the private law is really necessary to one who would be a sound public lawyer.... Finally, many of the rules of private law are adopted largely because of their influence upon social and political conditions.... For these reasons the American Political Science Association has included among the subjects which are not foreign to it comparative legislation and historical and comparative jurisprudence, whether that legislation or jurisprudence is public or private. It will probably be true, however, that the distinctly private legal subjects will not receive at our hands any very exhaustive treatment.

Frank J. Goodnow, The Work of the American Political Science Association, 1 Proceedings of the Amer. Pol. Sci. Assoc. 35, 40-41 (1904).

Tomorrow’s Great Moment: Felix Frankfurter argues for more of a division between law and political science.

(Also, for an earlier discussion on the impact of Pritchett and Legal Realism on the Great Divide, see here.)

Blog Forum – Interdisciplinary Ignorance and the Great Divide

This week’s blog forum takes up the relationship between law and political science. Our guests for the discussion are Frank Cross of the University of Texas and Gerald Rosenberg of the University of Chicago. Several years ago, Cross (1997) and Rosenberg (2000) both expressed similar concerns about the gulf between legal scholars and political scientists:

“The attitudinal model ascribes judicial decisions almost entirely to politics, not precedents. To date, legal scholarship has been remarkably oblivious to this large and mounting body of political science scholarship on courts. Some political scientists have been correspondingly unconscious of the legal model.”  Frank B. Cross, Political Science and the New Legal Realism: A Case of Unfortunate Interdisciplinary Ignorance, 92 Nw. U.L. Rev. 251, 252-53 (1997);

“Today, legal academics and political scientists inhabit different worlds with little in common. If they communicate at all, they can barely hear each other; they stand on opposite sides of a great divide, and they are looking in opposite directions.” Gerald Rosenberg, Across the Great Divide (Between Law and Political Science), 3 Green Bag 2d 267, 267 (2000).

We are very pleased that Cross and Rosenberg have offered to revisit this topic on the ELS Blog. Much has changed in the past few years. Empirical and interdisciplinary scholarship would seem to be a growth industry in the law schools, which suggests the unfortunate situation identified by Cross and Rosenberg may be improving. So is interdisciplinary ignorance giving way to understanding? Is the great divide narrowing? Stay tuned.

Grand finale

I think we are drawing to a close on our blog forum, and I think Jeffrey and Bill have graciously agreed to let me have the last word.  I greatly appreciate all the points and comments, and am (naturally) particularly fond of Bill's robust defense of teaching evaluations. 

As for the question of the complexity of the relationship I am actually planning to use the underlying data for two additional projects that may reach some of Jeffrey's concerns.  The first is a large scale regression analysis where I greatly increase the number of variables to include any publicly available AALS information on the law professors studied (such as gender, years in teaching, years in practice before teaching, law school attended, primary teaching area, etc.) to see if any of those variables correlate with teaching or research.

The second is a qualitative study of the professors.  I will start with a mailing inquiring about their own views on the interaction between teaching and research, and then probably follow up with some phone interviews.  With these additional data and observations I will hopefully be able to offer more than just the raw numbers.  Thanks again for the forum, and please don't hesitate to email any further feedback or suggestions.   Ben Barton.

Teaching - Writing Correlation

There is a lot of research on student evaluations, perhaps two-thousand articles. One meta analysis indicates that student ratings are affected much more by expressiveness than by content, while student achievement is affected more by content than by expressiveness.  See 'Educational Seduction', by Abrami, Leventhal, and Perry, in Review of Educational Research. That does not mean there is no correlation between ratings and effectiveness, but it does mean we need to be cautious in making conclusions about perhaps subtle effects on effectiveness when our data are from ratings. I am not criticizing Benjamin for using ratings; indeed, I admire and applaud his effort. I would just prefer that the conclusions be stated without the logical leap. What is wrong with saying, "I found no correlation between writing output and student ratings." That would let the reader decide how much to conclude about teaching effectiveness.

As for Bill's market point, I am not arguing that these educated consumers we call students do not know what they want or that they do not know it when they see it.  But I have little faith that they want what we educators think they need, as opposed to entertainment or bar passage. They could rationally choose to give up some small bit of lawyering effectiveness in the future for some entertainment now. I have even less faith that they want to learn what society needs them to learn for the good of all. I'd bet big money that I could raise my student ratings and lower the quality of my Property instruction by replacing future interests with more on landlord-tenant law.

The more important point that I wanted to make is that Benjamin seems to be looking for a simple relationship when a complex one is more likely. To carry my optimization point further, suppose that most faculty members have experimented with more or less research time, or in some other way have found a mix of preparation and publication that maximizes the value of their own efforts, in their own eyes of course. It seems entirely possible that asking them to do more writing would result in substantially lower quality teaching, otherwise they would have made that trade themselves. On the other hand, asking them to do substantially more class preparation would result in less writing without substantially advancing their teaching effectiveness. We should not be surprised to find that each faculty member reaches his or her optimum at a different mix of teaching and writing. This sets up what might be viewed as a restriction-of-range problem. It is possible that the data would not reveal any correlation for the group even though a complex relationship would indeed exist for each faculty member.

In short, it seems likely that writing and teaching are complements at low levels of writing and substitutes at high levels of writing, and determining whether any particular faculty member has increased his or her writing to the point that further increases will reduce teaching quality is a very tricky business.

Jeffrey E. Stake

In Defense of Teaching Evaluations as a Valid Measure of Quality

Drawing upon a large representative sample from 19 ABA-approved law schools, Ben Barton’s study found no statistically relationship between various measures of scholarly output and teaching effectiveness.  If this result is correct, then much of the legal academy’s discourse on “law school quality” is fundamentally flawed.

Rather than let go of old and comfortable ideas, many law professors will look for a basis to dispute the study’s findings. As noted in Ben’s last post, the critique of his study that will probably enjoy the most currency is the claim that law students are incapable of evaluating effective law school teaching.  As a result, teaching evaluations are an invalid measure of instructor quality.

In Ben’s defense, I believe he has ceded too much ground.  There are at least three reasons why the critics of teaching evaluations are wrong. 

Teaching Evaluations

Thanks so much to Jeffrey for his extremely thoughtful response to my study.  There is a lot there, so I'll just respond in chunks, and start by ceding his conclusion: "the finding of no correlation does not eliminate the possibility of a complex causal connection."  That is likely true of any correlation study, and is certainly true here.  Any correlation study is only as good as the data, and even with perfect data a correlation study can only report a raw finding of either positive, negative, or no correlation.  As I note in the paper it is dangerous to extrapolate too much from a correlation study, and I certainly agree that I can't rule out some hidden complex causal connection.

Nevertheless, I do feel obligated to mount a defense for the much maligned student evaluation.  I have three basic lines of defense.  The first is practical.  For better or worse, teacher evaluations are the only viable way to measure teaching effectiveness for a study of this breadth.  My other choices were exceedingly unpalatable: 1) attempt to gather peer evaluation data, which is rarely if ever expressed numerically, and would also almost certainly not be provided by the host institutions; or 2) use some type of personal subjective measure of teaching effectiveness, potentially requiring me to personally visit classes and make my own determination on teaching effectiveness.  In sum, these data are not only the best data, they are the only usable data.

The second is empirical.  While there are various studies showing biases in student teaching evaluations (although I am not aware of a study that shows the biases Jeffrey mentions), there are other studies showing that student evaluations are reliable and valid, and that student evaluations correlate with other measures of teaching effectiveness, including  peer evaluations and tests of student retention.  My favorite overview is Herbert Marsh's 1987 publication "Students’ evaluations of University Teaching: Research Findings, Methodological Issues, and Directions for Further Research."   Theall and Franklin have a more recent book called "The Student Ratings Debate" that provides a good overview of the controversy, and a chapter entitled “Looking for Bias in all the Wrong Places" that updates the state of the empirical studies and provides further support for student evaluation validity.

My last line of defense is, sadly, anecdotal.  It was not that long ago that I sat in a law school classroom and evaluated my law school professors.  At that point I had experienced approximately 17-19 years of schooling, and I think I was a pretty decent judge of good teaching.  I had certainly seen my share of both over the years.  I was also poised to take on the responsibility of becoming a lawyer and representing actual clients in court.  Nevertheless, many members of the legal academy assume that I was unqualified to determine whether the teaching I received was effective, and even guess that I filled out my forms based on a popularity contest, or the ease of the course.  This strikes me as somewhat paternalistic, and an underestimation of the abilities, sophistication, and discernment of our students.  I will also note, for the record, that I am a solidly middle of the pack teacher at Tennessee based on my evaluations and I accept that as a fair evaluation.