Empirical Legal Studies

Levering AI in the Service of Contract Interpretation

Contract interpretation canons and theories continue to evolve. The latest foray seeks to lever AI.

In a recent article, Generative Interpretation, the authors, David Hoffman (Penn) and Yonathan Arbel (Alabama), advance a new approach designed to assist in determining contracting parties’ meaning. The authors' impulse behind generative interpretation, is, according to them, "simple:" they apply large language models (LLMs) to contractual texts and extrinsic evidence to predict what the parties would have said at contracting about what they meant. The paper's abstract follows.

“We introduce generative interpretation, a new approach to estimating contractual meaning using large language models. As AI triumphalism is the order of the day, we proceed by way of grounded case studies, each illustrating the capabilities of these novel tools in distinct ways. Taking well-known contracts opinions, and sourcing the actual agreements that they adjudicated, we show that AI models can help factfinders ascertain ordinary meaning in context, quantify ambiguity, and fill gaps in parties’ agreements. We also illustrate how models can calculate the probative value of individual pieces of extrinsic evidence.

After offering best practices for the use of these models given their limitations, we consider their implications for judicial practice and contract theory. Using LLMs permits courts to estimate what the parties intended cheaply and accurately, and as such generative interpretation unsettles the current interpretative stalemate. Their use responds to efficiency-minded textualists and justice-oriented contextualists, who argue about whether parties will prefer cost and certainty or accuracy and fairness. Parties—and courts—would prefer a middle path, in which adjudicators strive to predict what the contract really meant, admitting just enough context to approximate reality while avoiding unguided and biased assimilation of evidence. As generative interpretation offers this possibility, we argue it can become the new workhorse of contractual interpretation.”

Lower Fedreal Courts and Religious Claims: An Update

The Supreme Court's ongoing readjustment of long-standing Free Exercise and Establishment clause tensions has renewed scholarly attention to courts' resolutions of religious claims. And in a recent paper, Trump's Lower-Court Judges and Religion: An Initial Appraisal, Stephen Choi (NYU) et al. contribute to a growing empirical literature by levering data on Trump-appointed Circuit Court judges in Free Exercise Clause cases and comparing Trump-appointed judge outcomes with those of Non-Trump Republican- and Democratic-appointed judges.

What the authors find includes that "Trump’s judicial appointments are more religious but no less qualified than other judges," and that "Trump judges are more likely to vote in favor of the plaintiff than not only Democratic judges, but also judges appointed by other Republican presidents."

Notably, however, while Trump-appointed judges vote “pro-religion” (that is, in favor of a religious plaintiff asserting a free exercise claim) more frequently than other judges, this tilt distributes unevenly across various religions. For example, and as the table below illustrates, the authors find “... different voting patterns for Islam. For cases involving Islam, Trump judges vote in favor of Muslim plaintiffs in only 19.2% of the cases compared with 34.5% for Non-Trump Republicans and 48.0% for Democrats.” The authors note that the overall pattern that emerges is “consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism).”

 

 

The paper's abstract follows.

“It is widely believed that President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments reflected a strategy of appeasing evangelical Christians and other religious groups that favored a more conservative, Christian judiciary, and that in pursuing this strategy Trump sacrificed quality. We explore evidence for this theory by examining the biographies and credentials of Trump’s lower court nominees and the voting records of his judicial appointments to the circuit courts in free exercise cases. We find that Trump’s appointments to the lower courts have stronger or more numerous religious affiliations, and are affiliated with the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association at unusually high rates, but are no less well credentialed than other judges are. We also find that Trump’s appointments to the circuit court more frequently vote in favor of Christian plaintiffs, and less frequently vote in favor of Muslim plaintiffs, in free exercise cases than judges appointed by other Republican presidents and by Democratic presidents.”

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...”

Specific Performance, Expectations, and Elon Musk

For one brief moment in time in 2022, to some it looked as though a Delaware judge was poised to order Elon Musk to purchase Twitter, over his objections, due to a contract breach. Had that happened, as Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (Penn) et al. note in Expecting Specific Performance, it would have been "the highest-profile specific performance order in living memory."

The incident helped prompt Wilkinson-Ryan and colleagues to explore intuitions on specific performance through a series of mixed-method experiments. And what they find, on balance, are "fragile" intuitions. Levering a mix of survey and experimental data, the authors find that "ordinary people think that courts will give them exactly what they bargained for after breach of contract; in other words, specific performance is the expected contractual remedy." They go on to argue that "the default expectation of equitable relief is a widespread but malleable intuition—and that even a fragile legal intuition has practical consequences, individually and systemically." Indeed, updating subjects with the prospect of money damages for a contract breach loosens initial default expectations for specific performance. The paper's abstract follows.

“Using a series of surveys and experiments, we find that ordinary people think that courts will give them exactly what they bargained for after breach of contract; in other words, specific performance is the expected contractual remedy. This expectation is widespread even for the diverse array of deals where the legal remedy is traditionally limited to money damages. But for a significant fraction of people, the focus on equity seems to be a naïve belief that is open to updating. In the studies reported here, individuals were less likely to anticipate specific performance when they were briefly introduced to the possibility that courts sometimes award damages in contract disputes.

We argue that the default expectation of equitable relief is a widespread but malleable intuition—and that even a fragile legal intuition has practical consequences, individually and systemically. In a follow-up experiment, we show that subjects are more interested in the prospect of efficient breach when they know that money damages are a possible remedy. This finding suggests that the mismatch between what people assume the law will do (specific performance) and what it actually does (money damages) sometimes encourages performance. We consider the potential for exploitation of this tendency. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how law and psychologists should elicit folk beliefs about legal rules and remedies."

ChatGPT & Statistical Analyses

I suspected discussions about this were inevitable; I wasn't disappointed. Where this may land over time in terms of coding, data, etc. is anyone's guess.

Criminal Records & Accuracy

Given the outsized implications for individuals, to note that criminal record keeping requires accuracy is to note merely the obvious. This is especially true in the employment context where "94% of employers conduct background checks" on job applicants. Growing employer demand for background checks has, in turn, fueled a dramatic increase in private sector service providers in this space. While access to and uses of criminal records have expanded, concerns persist about "serious data quality problems" in various criminal justice databases.

To explore this issue, in a recent paper, The Problem With Criminal Records, Sarah Lageson (Rutgers--crim. just.) & Robert Stewart (Maryland--crim. just.) compare criminal record reports for 101 New Jersey participants, all of whom had at least one criminal change in their history, across three sources: (1) the official state record; (2) a consumer reporting agency; and (3) an open source, public records data aggregator. The researchers then asked each of the 101 participants to review and audit the information retrieved from the three sources.

As the figure above visually implies, what the researchers found includes errors, and lots of them. Among the 2,406 individual charges reported by the three separate sources, only 8.3% of the participants' criminal charges (200/2,406) were accurately reported by all three sources. Moreover, 60% and 50% of participants had at least one false positive error on their regulated and unregulated background checks, and nearly all (90% and 92% of participants, respectively) had at least one false negative error. As this study is limited to individuals with criminal histories, it remains unclear whether errors also implicate those with no criminal history. The paper's abstract follows.

"Criminal records are routinely used by employers and other institutional decision-makers, who rely on their presumed fidelity, to evaluate applicants. We analyze criminal records for a sample of 101 people, comparing official state reports, two sources of private sector background checks (one regulated and one unregulated), and qualitative interviews. Based on our analysis, private sector background checks are laden with false positive and false negative errors: 60% and 50% of participants had at least one false positive error on their regulated and unregulated background checks, and nearly all (90% and 92% of participants, respectively) had at least one false negative error. We define specific problems with private sector criminal records: mismatched data that create false negatives, missing case dispositions that create incomplete and misleading criminal records, and incorrect data that create false positives. The prevalence of error in private sector background checks limits access to social opportunities ranging from employment, education, and housing."

More Evidence of a Racialized Death Penalty

Notably, race does not emerge as a central concern in the Court’s Furman decision, now more than fifty years old. In the decades since Furman, however, empirical evidence continues to mount documenting that "racial discrimination infects the administration of the death penalty." A recent paper by Jeffrey Fagan et al. (Columbia), Getting to Death: Race and the Paths of Capital Cases after Furman, represents a recent and important contribution to this literature. Researchers visited each judicial circuit in Georgia to record the details of every murder case that entered the courts from 1994–2005. Analyses of the 1,317 death-eligible murders suggest that “race continues to matter, and that the statutory aggravators that distinguish death cases from other killings are themselves racialized.” A more detailed description of the paper's core findings appears in the Abstract (below).

“Decades of research on the administration of the death penalty have recognized the persistent arbitrariness in its implementation and the racial inequality in the selection of defendants and cases for capital punishment. This Article provides new insights into the combined effects of these two constitutional challenges. We show how these features of post-Furman capital punishment operate at each stage of adjudication, from charging death-eligible cases to plea negotiations to the selection of eligible cases for execution and ultimately to the execution itself, and how their effects combine to sustain the constitutional violations first identified 50 years ago in Furman. Analyzing a dataset of 2,328 first- degree murder convictions in Georgia from 1995–2004 that produced 1,317 death eligible cases, we show that two features of these cases combine to produce a small group of persons facing execution: victim race and gender, and a set of case-specific features that are often correlated with race. We also show that these features explain which cases progress from the initial stages of charging to a death sentence, and which are removed from death eligibility at each stage through plea negotiations. Consistent with decades of death penalty research, we also show the special focus of prosecution on cases where Black defendants murder white victims. The evidence in the Georgia records suggests a regime marred less by overbreadth in its statute than capriciousness and randomness in the decision to seek death and to seek it in a racially disparate manner. These two dimensions of capital case adjudication combine to sustain the twin failures that produce the fatal lottery that is the death penalty.”

Judges' Financial Holdings, Case Outcomes, and Recusal

Fundamental to the notion of a fair trial and the rule of law is the principle that a judge shall apply the law impartially and free from the influence of any personal biases. When real or perceived conflicts of interest emerge, judges are expected to recuse themselves. Despite such an expectation, however, recent Wall Street Journal reporting revealed many cases where judges violated U.S. law and judicial ethics (28 U.S.C. Section 455) by overseeing cases that involve companies in which they or their family-owned stock. Unsurprisingly, several of the cases with conflicts have been appealed.

While Chief Justice John Roberts downplayed the significance of the Wall Street Journal reporting, characterizing the judges' failures to recuse as "isolated violations" and "unintentional oversights," empirical explorations of the potential influence of judges' financial holdings on case outcomes remain rare. To address this scholarly gap, a recent paper, Judge Financial Holdings and Case Outcomes: Evidence from Judge Financial Disclosures, examines whether there is a relation between the financial holdings of judges and the outcomes of the trials over which they preside.

To construct the judges' investment data set, Harit (Univ. Texas-Dallas—mgmt.) et al. extracted judge financial disclosure data from the Free Law Project website. Their sample includes 33,726 annual disclosure reports involving 3,250 federal judges from 2000 to 2020. The authors lever the random assignment of cases to judges and examine whether a judge's rulings are related to his or her stock ownership in one or more of the parties in the case. The paper finds robust evidence that judges rule more favorably and take longer when deciding over conflicted cases as compared to unconflicted ones. It also notes that investors are positively surprised by these outcomes. The abstract follows.

"This paper examines the association between a judge's financial holdings and the outcome of legal cases. Using novel data on financial disclosures of judges and the civil case information of public firms across district courts in the United States between 2000 and 2021, we document multiple instances in which judges fail to recuse themselves in cases where they hold common stock. We find robust evidence that judges rule more favorably and take longer when deciding over conflicted cases as compared to unconflicted ones. We also find that investors are positively surprised by these outcomes, as reflected by stock returns to trial outcomes. Collectively, our results provide the first large-scale evidence of the relation between judges' financial holdings and case outcomes."

The Empirics of Sobriety Checkpoint Stops

Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death for Americans under age 25, and many of these crashes involve substance use. To help reduce the volume of impaired drivers, many--but not all--states allow for sobriety checkpoints (SC). While historically checkpoint stops were used to enforce drunk driving laws, they are increasingly being used to deter and prosecute drugged drivers, especially in states where marijuana is legal.

Although “no-cause” traffic stops remain controversial, comparatively little data exist that helps inform related debates. While the SCOTUS permits such stops as a general matter, courts in eleven states have ruled that state constitutional provisions preclude sobriety checkpoints. And those states that discontinued sobriety checkpoints provide a critical source of data that a recent paper, Sobriety Checkpoint Law, Fatal Car Crashes and Arrests, exploits. In their paper, Lauren Jones (OSU—public affairs) and C. Blain Moran (OSU—public affairs) compare trends in event frequencies “across states that did and did not turn off their SC laws, net of confounding factors.” The paper finds, at bottom, that when states make sobriety checkpoints illegal, annual fatal crashes and DUI arrests increase. The paper also notes a racial effect relating to DUI and cannabis arrests. The abstract follows.

“Sobriety checkpoints have been used since the early 1980s to enforce laws prohibiting driving while intoxicated (DWI), and to deter DWI. However, their constitutionality has been questioned, as they allow police to stop drivers without cause. As a result, eleven states have banned their use. Using a two-way fixed effects event study analysis, we estimate the effect of rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal on state-level counts of fatal car crashes, and arrests for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol (DUI), and drug possession. We find evidence that when states make sobriety checkpoints illegal, the number of annual fatal crashes increases by 17 percent. We also find evidence that rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal leads to a 25 percent increase in the number of annual DUI arrests in a state, suggesting that the deterrent effect of checkpoints is much stronger than their enforcement impacts. We also find suggestive evidence that eliminating sobriety checkpoints increases racial disparities in DUI and cannabis possession arrests, with larger impacts on arrests among Black residents.”

Case Outcomes & Judge Financial Conflicts

To assist with insuring that "justice is blind," a presiding judge is expected to recuse from any case where he/she is financially conflicted with any of the litigating parties. Evidence that this expectation is not being consistently met was widely reported in 2020-2021. Indeed, the public controversy elicited a response from Chief Justice John Roberts. In his 2021 annual report on the federal judiciary, and in direct response to the controversy surrounding numerous federal judges, Chief Justice Roberts downplayed the controversy’s significance, characterizing the incidents as "isolated violations" and "unintentional oversights."

Notwithstanding Justice Roberts' characterizations, given the widespread implications posed by judges' failures to recuse when proper it is important to understand whether these recent episodes are one-time incidents or point to a larger, systemic problem. To address this question, in a recent paper, Judge Financial Holdings and Case Outcomes: Evidence from Judge Financial Disclosures, Tuhin Harit (Univ. Dallas--Mgmt.) et al. examine whether there is a relation between judges' disclosed financial holdings and the outcomes of the trials over which they presided.

Drawing from a sample that includes cases from 2000–2021, the paper finds that “stock ownership by judges significantly improves the chances of a litigant's winning a case.” In cases where the presiding judge is financially conflicted with either the defendant or plaintiff, “their chance of a favorable decision improves by 3.3% and 4.3%, respectively, after controlling for judge, industry, district, case file year, and firm characteristics.” An excerpted abstract follows.

"... Using novel data on financial disclosures of judges and the civil case information of public firms across district courts in the United States between 2000 and 2021, we document multiple instances in which judges fail to recuse themselves in cases where they hold common stock. We find robust evidence that judges rule more favorably and take longer when deciding over conflicted cases as compared to unconflicted ones. We also find that investors are positively surprised by these outcomes, as reflected by stock returns to trial outcomes. Collectively, our results provide the first large-scale evidence of the relation between judges' financial holdings and case outcomes.”

Firearms' Preferences and an Empirical Analysis of Secondary and Tertiary Regulatory Consequences

Civilian (household) gun ownership levels continue rise along with efforts to regulate gun ownership and possession. Scholarly efforts in this space, while increasing, confront complex data, modeling, and research design challenges.

In Preferences for Firearms and Their Implications for Regulation, the authors, Sarah Moshary (UC Berkeley—Business) et al., steer clear of trying to identify causal links between gun ownership and crime or gun deaths. Instead, the paper "estimates the effects of policy on both the number and types of guns sold in the primary market, as well as the consumer surplus that accrues to gun owners from their purchases.”

Among the various policy counterfactual simulations that the paper explores include a policy that bans assault weapons. What the paper's findings imply is a consumer shift from assault weapon ownership to firearm ownership. This is so, the paper argues, because even though consumers who are in the market for handguns do not consider long guns at all, many consumers that consider purchasing a long gun, by contrast, "are also interested in buying a handgun." As the "vast majority" of gun violence involves handguns, however, this substitution effect, fueled by a regulatory ban, introduces complicating policy wrinkles. The paper's abstract follows.

“This paper estimates consumer demand for firearms with the aim of evaluating the likely impacts of firearm regulations. We first conduct a stated-choice-based conjoint analysis and estimate an individual-level demand model for firearms. We validate our estimates using aggregate moments from observational data. Next, we use our estimates to simulate changes in the number and types of guns in circulation under alternative regulations. Importantly, we find that bans or restrictions that specifically target ‘assault weapons’ increase demand for handguns, which are associated with the vast majority of firearm-related violence. We provide distributions of consumer surplus under counterfactuals and discuss how those distributions could be useful for crafting policy."

Checks on Prosecutorial Power

In light of the significant authority that prosecutors wield, we want them to be, at once, both accountable and independent. Obviously, these twin goals are structurally at odds with each other. "Electing prosecutors ensures that they are accountable, but it limits their independence. In contrast, appointing prosecutors increases independence, but it does so at the expense of accountability." In the U.S., 45/50 states elect local prosecutors "who bear the primary responsibility for bringing felony prosecutions in their jurisdictions." However, as Carissa Hessick (UNC) et al. note in a recent paper, Understanding Uncontested Prosecutor Elections: "[prosecutor] elections in the United States generally fail to capture the accountability benefits of elections because so many prosecutor elections are largely uncontested and uncompetitive."

Drawing partly on data gathered by the Prosecutors and Politics Project, the paper models "contested" prosecutor elections. In a slight break from prior findings from related literatures, this paper's core findings emphasize the salience of whether an incumbent is running and the jurisdiction's population. The paper's (excerpted) abstract follows.

"... Using a logistic regression analysis, this Article estimates the individual effects of a number of variables on prosecutor elections. It finds that several factors that have been previously identified as contributing to uncontested election are not, in fact, what drives uncontested elections for prosecutors. Instead, the factors with the largest effect are whether an incumbent runs and the population of the district. It also identifies two features of state election law that contribute to the dearth of contested elections. The Article concludes by noting that these factors suggest specific policy changes that could help to increase the number of contested and competitive elections—thus ensuring that voters can help guide important criminal justice decisions in their communities."

Assessing Primary and Secondary Effects of Sobriety Checkpoints

While police use of sobriety checkpoints has become increasingly common since the 1980s, legal discomfort, particularly Fourth Amendment concerns, persist. While the SCOTUS concluded in its Sitz decision (1990) that sobriety checkpoints' social benefits outweighed costs on individual liberties, states remain free to preclude their use. Indeed, 11 states have ruled sobriety checkpoints illegal.

Aside from their legal status, empirical questions about sobriety checkpoints' efficacy lurk. In an intriguing new contribution to the emerging empirical literature, Sobriety Checkpoint Laws, Fatal Cars Crashes and Arrests, Lauren Jones (OSU--Public Policy) and C. Blain Morin (OSU--Public Policy) explore the effects of a state removing sobriety checkpoints on fatal car crashes and arrests.

Leveraging data from the Fatality Analysis and Reporting System and Uniform Crime Reports, the authors execute a twoway fixed effects (TWFE), event study analysis. As the paper notes, the twoway fixed effects analysis extends a difference-in-difference specification, where changes in outcomes across pre-treatment and post-treatment time periods are compared, across a treated unit and a control unit. As the abstract (below) makes clear, the paper's key findings include an annual 17 percent increase in fatal crashes and a 25 percent increase in the number of DUI arrests in states that cease using sobriety checkpoints.

“Sobriety checkpoints have been used since the early 1980s to enforce laws prohibiting driving while intoxicated (DWI), and to deter DWI. However, their constitutionality has been questioned, as they allow police to stop drivers without cause. As a result, eleven states have banned their use. Using a two-way fixed effects event study analysis, we estimate the effect of rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal on state-level counts of fatal car crashes, and arrests for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol (DUI), and drug possession. We find evidence that when states make sobriety checkpoints illegal, the number of annual fatal crashes increases by 17 percent. We also find evidence that rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal leads to a 25 percent increase in the number of annual DUI arrests in a state, suggesting that the deterrent effect of checkpoints is much stronger than their enforcement impacts. We also find suggestive evidence that eliminating sobriety checkpoints increases racial disparities in DUI and cannabis possession arrests, with larger impacts on arrests among Black residents.”

Business Litigants and the Roberts Court

Assessing “How pro business is the Roberts Court?” is both straightforward and complicated. Based on how business litigants fare in the Roberts Court versus non-business litigants over time, business does quite well. The win rate for business in the Roberts Court, 63.4 percent, is 15 percentage points higher than the next highest rate of business wins over the past century (the Rehnquist Court, at 48.3 percent). While it may be tempting for many to conclude that the current pro business tilt is purely a function of a Republican majority of justices on the Roberts Court, as Lee Epstein (USC) and Mitu Gulati (Virginia) argue in a recent paper, A Century of Business in the Supreme Court, 1920-2020, “this is only the beginning of the story.”

Epstein and Gulati bring data from the Supreme Court Database to the question. Starting with the 11,121 orally argued cases resulting in a signed opinion or judgment between the 1920-2020 terms, their paper focuses only on those 4,070 cases (35,173 votes) in which business was the petitioner (appellant) or respondent (appellee). That is, they excluded cases in which business was on both sides of a legal dispute.

Their core findings defy conventional wisdom and inject important complicating wrinkles. What they find includes: "(a) It is not just the Republicans on the Roberts Court who are more pro business than in prior Courts, but the Democrats as well; (b) The Government, through the SG’s office and across both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been much more supportive of business positions than in prior eras; and (c) An elite Supreme Court bar has emerged in recent years and businesses have hired them disproportionately so as to better influence the Court."

Empirical Contours of the Political Question Doctrine

Amid the enduring and varied debates about the political question doctrine, motivated by the Supreme Court's 1962 Baker v. Carr decision, the scholarly commentary shares one key attribute. Specifically, it dwells on the Supreme Court. Such a focus is ironic as while the Court has only rarely applied the political question doctrine, lower federal courts, by contrast, have invoked the doctrine "as a basis for dismissal in hundreds of cases." Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative (descriptive) methods, in a recent paper, The Real Political Question Doctrine, Curtis Bradley (Chicago) and Eric Posner (Chicago) explore how the political question doctrine has operated in the lower courts since the Supreme Court's Baker decision.

The authors find that lower courts use the doctrine to "evaluate their own institutional capacity to resolve politically sensitive disputes. It is the lower courts’ more limited capacity compared to the Supreme Court that explains the lower courts’ heavier reliance on the doctrine." More specifically, "the political question doctrine is a screening mechanism that the lower courts use to take account of limits on their institutional capacity. The Supreme Court has less need for this mechanism, so most of the doctrine’s life must be found in the foothills rather than at the summit of Mount Olympus. From this standpoint, the doctrine is not moribund but full of life. It is not limited in the ways suggested by the 'classical' or 'functional' theories. The lower court practice is best captured by Bickel’s prudential theory." An excerpted abstract follows.

"... We provide the first empirical account of how the doctrine has operated in the lower courts since Baker. Our account is based on both a quantitative analysis of a sample of these decisions and on a qualitative review of these and other decisions. This account reveals a political question doctrine that is substantially different from the one described in most scholarship: it is more vibrant, heavily focused on foreign affairs, often applied in non-constitutional cases, more prudential, and not a permanent disallowance of judicial review...."