Empirical Legal Studies

Legal Precedent and Decay

While the idea of legal precedent implies some degree of durability, precedents are not immortal. Over time, they lose their capacity to influence action; eventually they cease to be of anything other than historical interest. Although precedential decay's existence is generally accepted, the determinants of precedential decay are comparatively under-studied.

Yun-chien Chang (Cornell) & Geoffrey Miller’s (NYU) recent paper, Decay of Precedent in State Supreme Courts, extends this literature by analyzing citation decay patterns in state supreme court opinions, drawing on three different (and large) data bases. Their paper examines both “backward-looking” precedential decay—the frequency with which opinions in a given year cite to opinions from prior years as well as “forward-looking” decay—the frequency with which specific precedents are cited in later opinions. One key finding includes the extraordinary persistence of exponential decay across all of the data. The paper’s abstract follows.

“This paper investigates the decay of precedents in three unique databases: citations in all published opinions by state supreme courts in 2019 (102,555 citations); citations in all published opinions by state supreme courts in 2003 (114,777 citations); and citations by all state and federal courts to state supreme court opinions issued in 2003 (259,627 citations). We find that the frequency of citation drops off by a roughly constant ratio with each passing year. The large scale of our yearly data and the time studied (1904–2019) suggests that this pattern must be the result of underlying forces not having to do with particular circumstances of time or place. We also find that cases with dissents tend to cite older cases and longer decisions tend to be cited more often and faster. Criminal law cases, as compared to constitutional law cases, tend to cite more recent precedents, while trust and estate cases tend to cite older precedents. We offer some conjectures about possible reasons for the observed differences in decay rates.”

How to Value Data

While a recent paper, Data Valuation and Law, is not itself an "empirical paper," it is certainly "ELS-adjacent" and, as such, I thought it might interest some. This is particularly so as both AI and "big data" become increasingly important.

Motivating Jordan Berry (USC) and D. Daniel Sokol's (USC) paper is the observation that "while data has become increasingly valuable and important, the law’s attempts to value data have lagged, remaining confused and underdeveloped." To improve matters in this regard, the paper advances a “real options” approach for framing data valuation not because the approach is perfect but, rather, because “it is the least bad alternative available.” The paper's abstract follows.

"Data has become an increasingly valuable asset. Numerous areas of law—including contracts, corporate law, IP, antitrust, tax, privacy, and bankruptcy—require parties and courts to determine the value of assets, including data. Unfortunately, data valuation has been hindered by a lack of clarity over what data is and why it is valuable. This lack of clarity also increases the chances of legal decisionmakers valuing data in inconsistent ways, which would create further confusion, inefficiencies, and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage.

This article proposes a unified framework for valuing data that will promote consistent valuations across fields of law. It begins by conceptualizing data as building blocks: It is of little value on its own. But when placed in skillful and creative hands, it can unlock choices for its holders—choices they would not otherwise have—that can generate tremendous profits. Thus, data constitutes what is known as a ‘real option.’ This article shows how using real options to value data can significantly improve upon existing data valuation practices.”

SCOTUS Nominations, By the Nimbers and Over Time

Charles Cameron (Princeton--politics ) & Jonathan Kastellec (Princeton--politics) recently published a book, Making the Supreme Court (OUP), that tracks 90 years of POTUS appointments to the Supreme Court. The Book's description (below) makes clear what the authors attempt to achieve with their book. The authors' execution benefits from data, including on:

• Party and presidential interest in the court, including the use of “litmus tests” for Supreme Court nominees;
• The type of selection processes employed by the president;
• The background characteristics of Supreme Court nominees, and those who made the president’s “short list”;
• Interest group participation in Supreme Court confirmation battles;
• Media coverage of Supreme Court nominees;
• Public opinion of nominees;
• Senate roll call voting on Supreme Court nominees; and
• Simulations on the future ideological trajectory of the Supreme Court.

But what particularly caught my eye was that the authors make available the data (and related coding) that they used in their analyses (click here).

“Appointments to the United States Supreme Court are now central events in American political life. Every vacancy unleashes a bitter struggle between Republicans and Democrats over nominees; and once the seat is filled, new justices typically vote in predictable ways. Making the Supreme Court examines 90 years of American political history to show how the growth of federal judicial power from the 1930s onward inspired presidents, the political parties, and interest groups to shape judicial policy through appointments. The result is a new politics aimed squarely at selecting and placing judicial ideologues on the Court, which has transformed the Court into an ideologically driven and polarized branch. Based on rich data and qualitative evidence, Making the Supreme Court provides a sharp lens on the social and political transformations that created a new American politics.”

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...”

Judicial Decisionmaking: Moving Beyond Case Outcomes

While conceding that "judges matter" as a general matter, a recent paper, Do Judges Matter?, considers a slightly narrower question: what about judges matters when it comes to the more mundane aspects incident to the business of judging?" More specifically, the authors, Yun-chien Chang (Cornell) and Geoffrey Miller (NYU), explore potential relationships "between a judge’s personal characteristics and the day-to-day business of courts – the writing of opinions, the use of citations, the frequency of dissent, and like factors."

Exploiting a hand-collected data set of 4,591 substantive decisions issued by 48 state supreme courts in 2003 (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), the paper finds that while state supreme courts themselves vary in how they carry out their judicial business (e.g., citation distributions, frequency of dissents), personal characteristics of judges, by contrast, have only a "negligible impact." The abstract follows.

"An extensive literature examines whether characteristics of judges correlate with votes on cases. These studies generally consider the judges’ votes on the merits of cases. Examining a data set of 4,591 decisions issued by 48 state supreme courts in 2003, we consider whether judges’ personal features affect their opinion writing. We find virtually no significant differences along any of the dimensions under review. Judicial characteristics matter only indirectly — ideological differences increase dissensus in public-law cases, which increases opinion length and citation numbers. Our study suggests that when carrying out the ordinary business of courts, judges are almost all the same."

Data on the Fourth Amendment's "Good Faaith" Exception's Application

While the Fourth Amendment is designed to protect criminal defendants against prosecutors' use of unlawfully obtained evidence, an important exception exists for evidence obtained by law enforcement officers who rely in good faith on existing legal authority. Thus, if police rely on a statute that turns out to be unconstitutional or invalid warrants or precedent, the evidence obtained is nonetheless admissible under the good faith exception.

Empirical analyses on how the good faith exception works "on the ground," however, are scant. To this end, a recent paper, The Reality of the Good Faith Exception, by Matthew Tokson (Utah) and Michael Gentithes (Akron), helps to fill a void.

Their paper draws from available published (and unpublished) judicial decisions (N=5,531) that mention the Fourth Amendment or "motion to suppress" across three separate months (July 2015, 2018, and 2021). Among the paper's findings includes a discernible uptick in the exceptions salience over time (see Figure 1, below).

Figure 1: Good Faith Exception (GFE) Prevalence Over Time - Proportion of Fourth Amendment Suppression Cases Involving the Good Faith Exception

The authors are correctly mindful that selection effects certainly influence their descriptive findings. The authors argue that selection effects in this context likely lead, on balance, to an under-counting of suppression hearings to the extent that "defendants and their attorneys likely decline to file suppression motions because of the good faith exception." (emphasis added)

Overall, the paper argues that "the [good faith] exception, originally confined to narrow circumstances, is turning into a protection for nearly any investigatory activity with an arguable connection to an existing precedent or statute" and that "[c]ourts rely on the exception with remarkable frequency, and a large proportion of courts invoking the exception avoid any substantive constitutional ruling, stunting the development of Fourth Amendment doctrine."

Lay Understandings of Civil Settlements

When it comes to resolving formal civil disputes, popular imagination, partly fueled by the media and entertainment industry, is dominated by "courtroom drama" and jury trials. Empirical work over the decades, however, paints quite a different picture, and one dominated by the "disappearing trial." Thus, as Jennifer Robbennolt (Illinois) et al. make clear in Settlement Schemas: How Laypeople Understand Civil Settlement, "for all the attention paid to the real and imagined drama of the courtroom, these depictions overlook the reality of how many disputes are resolved: through any means but trial."

In the service of seeking a better understanding of how the public understands civil settlements, the authors surveyed a representative sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults. Key findings include that while the public conveyed a widespread general understanding about civil settlements, evidence of misconceptions about the details, including the role of a jury and settlement scope, also emerged. The paper's abstract follows.

"What does the public think it means to ‘settle’ a civil case? Most legal disputes in the United States end in an agreement to settle, but little is known about what laypeople think about settlement. To fill this gap, we took a direct approach: we asked a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults – more than one thousand of them – basic questions about settlement. We found widespread understanding about the essential nature and frequency of settlement, but persistent, though not universal, misconceptions about the details, including the role of a jury and settlement scope. Because settlement is such a pervasive part of the U.S. legal system, the system’s legitimacy turns in part on how the public understands and views civil settlement. The survey reported here provides a foundational study of the understandings and framework – the schemas – that the public bring to settlement."

Sentencing as a Product of Plea Agreements

When it comes to explaining criminal sentences, conventional wisdom emphasizes either judges or, given that criminal convictions largely flow from negotiated plea agreements, prosecutors. A closer look, however, reveals far more nuance and complexity and a dynamic process involving multiple parties concurrently rather than a static event dominated by one actor.

In a recent "closer look," Jeffrey Bellin (William & Mary) & Jenia Turner (SMU) explore 77 plea bargains in the first half of 2019. Noting that comprehensive empirical work on judicial responses to negotiated plea deals is sparse, In Sentencing in an Era of Plea Bargains makes a few helpful contributions. First, the authors' deep dive into 77 pleas bargains, though descriptive, revels some initial, general contours of these agreements. Notably, while judges ultimately approved all of the 77 plea bargains in the paper's sample, judges departed from the negotiated sentencing recommendation in about one-third of the cases. Also notable is that in virtually all instances where the judge departed from the negotiated sentence, she did so in a direction that favored greater leniency. Second, in separate analyses the authors examine 31 plea agreements that elicited judicial rejections. Somewhat perplexingly, judges rejected most plea agreements (74%) because they felt the recommended sentence was too lenient.

Obviously, descriptive studies that lack statistical power are limited in important ways. At the same time, however, such studies can help by pointing future researchers in potential helpful directions. The paper's (excerpted) abstract follows.

“The literature offers inconsistent answers to a question that is foundational to criminal law: Who imposes sentences? Traditional narratives place sentencing responsibility in the hands of the judge. Yet, in a country where 95 percent of criminal convictions come from guilty pleas (not trials), modern American scholars center prosecutors – who control plea terms – as the decider of punishment. This Article highlights and seeks to resolve the tension between these conflicting narratives by charting the pathways by which sentences are determined in a system dominated by plea bargains.

After reviewing the empirical literature on sentence variation, state and federal plea-bargaining rules and doctrines, and conducting some empirical analysis of our own, we conclude that neither of the competing narratives is correct. Sentencing in the United States has become a dynamic process with substantial contributions from multiple actors, not a static event controlled by any single actor.”

How Summary Judgment Changes Vary Across Subject Areas

The Supreme Court upended summary judgment doctrine with a trilogy of cases in 1986. At the time--and largely persisting into current prevailing wisdom--it was assumed that the 1986 changes made summary judgment comparatively more available and, thus, of greater benefit to defendants. While empirical evidence remains somewhat scant, emerging findings paint a far more complex and nuanced picture.

A recent contribution to this research literature comes from Jonathan Nash (Emory) and Daniel Sokol (USC). In The Summary Judgment Revolution that Wasn't, the authors lever six separate (though related) datasets that draw from federal court decisions in three discrete areas (antitrust, civil rights, and securities regulation) and exploit the 1986 trilogy with pre- and post-intervention comparisons. At bottom, the paper finds "no evidence of the trilogy influencing summary judgment decision making in securities regulation, and at best mixed evidence of such an effect in civil rights cases. In contrast, we find that the trilogy did have a strong statistically significant effect on decision making in antitrust cases, at both the district court and court of appeals levels." The abstract follows.

"The U.S. Supreme Court decided a trilogy of cases on summary judgment in 1986. Questions remain as to how much effect these cases have had on judicial decision making in terms of wins and losses for plaintiffs. Shifts in wins and losses and what cases get to decisions on the merits impact access to justice. We assemble novel datasets to examine this question empirically in three areas of law that are more likely to respond to shifts in the standard for summary judgment: antitrust, securities regulation, and civil rights. We find that the Supreme Court’s decisions had a statistically significant effect in antitrust, an ambiguous effect in civil rights cases, and no effect in securities regulation. We also find that, in the trilogy’s wake, antitrust appellate cases were far more likely to cite trilogy cases—and in particular the one trilogy case that was an antitrust case—than appellate cases in the other areas. This suggests that the lone trilogy case that arose in antitrust had an effect on decision making in that field, but that the trilogy had a limited effect across other substantive areas. This finding differs from Twombly and Iqbal where an antitrust decision ultimately reshaped the entire body of law around motions to dismiss."

Experimental Judicial Decisionmaking Studies & External Validity

For experimental judicial decisionmaking studies, the "gold-standard" research design includes using actual judges as participants. My Cornell colleague (and good friend) Jeff Rachlinski is a leading scholar in this space. For an array of reasons (including practical reasons), too much of the experimental research in this field is hampered by researchers' use of students (including law students) as the experimental participants. To the extant that researchers seek to generalize results from judicial decisionmaking studies to the "universe of judges," conventional  wisdom suggests that the use of students in these experiments raises important external validity questions.

Of course, such (and most) "conventional wisdoms" rest on empirical assumptions. And in a recent paper, Can Law Students Replace Judges in Experiments of Judicial-Making?, Holger Spamann (Harvard) and Lars Klohn (Humboldt) submit this question to an experiment. The answer to the question they pose in their paper's title?: "unfortunately, no." The paper's abstract follows.

"Experimental research on judicial decision-making is hampered by the difficulty of recruiting judges as experimental participants. Can students be used in judges’ stead? Unfortunately, no. We ran the same high-context 2×2 factorial experiment of judicial decision-making focused on legal reasoning with 31 U.S. federal judges and 91 elite U.S. law students. We obtained diametrically opposed results. Judges’ decisions were strongly associated with one factor (sympathy, i.e., bias) but not the other (law). For students, it was the other way around. Equality between the two groups is strongly rejected. Equality of document-view patterns—a proxy for thought processes—and written reasons is also strongly rejected."

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."

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."

Modeling Rare Events--SCOTUS Clerkships

Of the approximate 36,000 law school students who graduate each year, only 36 or so end up securing a SCOTUS clerkship. While a handful of biographical and anecdotal accounts exist, very few systematic data exist on the "1-in-1,000" clerkship lottery.

A recent paper by Tracey George (Vanderbilt), Albert Yoon (Toronto), and Mitu Gulati (Virginia), Some Are More Equal Than Others: U.S. Supreme Court Clerkship, digs into 40 years worth of data and provides rich granularity about this statistical rare event. In the main, while some unexpected twists emerge, what the authors find generally comports with perceived wisdoms. For example, a disproportionate number of clerks emerge from five elite law schools. One interesting change, however, is that while a SCOTUS clerkship once led "primarily to government and universities [law faculties]," former clerks now increasingly land at "law firms and corporations." An excerpted abstract follows.

"... Yet, we lack a clear story about who wins this clerkship lottery. This Essay seeks to provide that story. Our analysis relies on new datasets of all Court clerks who served between 1980 and 2020, including the details of their path to the Court and their road after. We amend and expand on theories of success in this important labor market. All clerks are highly qualified, yet the same is true for many not chosen. We find that educational pedigree, as opposed to academic performance or any other qualification, often distinguishes the winners from the also-rans. The Court clerkship selection process, like other elite labor markets, proves to be a blend of status and merit where status often prevails. Our analysis does not end there, however. We go on to look at where this forty-year cohort is currently working and confirm that once attained, a Court clerkship does lead to a bounty of opportunities including a return to the Court as a justice. Thus, the Court clerkship lottery is an important labor market not only to lawyers but also to society writ large. In the elite legal labor market, some people are, in fact, more equal than others."