Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

Hiding Lawyer Misconduct: Evidence From Florida 隐藏律师的不当行为：来自佛罗里达州的证据

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-07-08 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12418

Kyle Rozema

引用次数: 0

The Diffusion of Deal Innovations in Complex Contractual Networks 复杂契约网络中交易创新的扩散

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-06-13 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12421

Kristina Bishop, Matthew Jennejohn, Cree Jones

{"title":"The Diffusion of Deal Innovations in Complex Contractual Networks","authors":"Kristina Bishop, Matthew Jennejohn, Cree Jones","doi":"10.1111/jels.12421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12421","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We introduce a new method for studying contractual evolution in complex markets. We situate the diffusion of a deal innovation within an advisory network and then provide methods for inferring a law firm's preference for adopting the innovation and for calculating each firm's proximity to prior adopters. This allows for granular analysis of firm-to-firm interactions as a diffusion mechanism. To demonstrate, we study the top-up option's diffusion in two-step tender offers from 1999 to 2013. Diffusion occurs in 40% of observations in which a non-adopting firm is directly connected to a prior adopter of the option. By contrast, diffusion occurs in only 4% of observations without a direct connection to a prior adopter. We find this relationship persists in even the most comprehensive regression analysis, finding that directly connected firms have a hazard of adoption that is 4.01 times that of firms with no direct connection, even after controlling for deal, firm, and industry characteristics. These results demonstrate the importance of firm-to-firm information transfers to contractual evolution and underscore their study as a research priority.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"378-396"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12421","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144774046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

In the Eye of the Beholder: How Lawyers Perceive Legal Ethical Problems 旁观者之眼：律师如何看待法律伦理问题

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-06-11 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12419

Albert Yoon

{"title":"In the Eye of the Beholder: How Lawyers Perceive Legal Ethical Problems","authors":"Albert Yoon","doi":"10.1111/jels.12419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12419","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In our interdependent and complex world, lawyers play an increasingly important role. The legal profession depends on lawyers' commitment to the rules of professional conduct governing how they interact with clients, courts, third parties, and one another. Recent events in both the political and private sphere provide examples where lawyers have fallen short of their fiduciary duties. While scholarship abounds on how lawyers should behave in light of their ethical obligations, our understanding of how lawyers approach these obligations remains underexplored. This article seeks to fill this gap. We conduct an experiment of licensed lawyers in Ontario, Canada where we randomly assign fact scenarios in which respondents stand to benefit or lose from ethically questionable conduct. We find that while a large majority of respondents from each randomized group found the conduct in question violated rules of professional conduct, they were less likely to reach that result if they benefitted from the conduct. And, when asked how most other lawyers would respond, a smaller percentage of both groups thought their peers would find a rule violation. Moreover, this gap between respondents' first-person and peer perceptions was larger when respondents of both the benefit and harm groups reached a higher consensus that a rule violation occurred. These findings provide evidence that lawyers are confident their own commitment to the rules of professional conduct exceeds that of their fellow lawyers. In the real world where actions matter as much as, if not more than, beliefs, lawyers' differing perceptions between self and others may affect their own fidelity to the rules of professional conduct.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"345-360"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12419","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144774156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Measuring the Perceived (In)accessibility of Courts and Lawyers 衡量法院和律师的可及性

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-06-01 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12417

Catrina Denvir, Nigel J. Balmer, Pascoe Pleasence, Tenielle Hagland

{"title":"Measuring the Perceived (In)accessibility of Courts and Lawyers","authors":"Catrina Denvir, Nigel J. Balmer, Pascoe Pleasence, Tenielle Hagland","doi":"10.1111/jels.12417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12417","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although the majority of those who face a civil justice problem will not attend court or seek advice from a lawyer, access to courts and legal services is critical to ensuring equal access to justice. This significance is captured in UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.3 and in efforts to measure progress against this goal by reference to the rate at which those with a dispute access formal or informal dispute resolution mechanisms. While the public's attitudes toward courts and lawyers have been implicated as determinants of use, there are no robust standardized scales to measure these attitudes. This study uses modern psychometric methods to develop two scales to measure the Perceived Inaccessibility of Courts (PIC) and of Lawyers (PIL). Drawing on relevant theoretical frameworks, we administered an item pool of 40 attitude questions to a sample of 1846 adults across Australia. Principal component analysis was used to identify attitude domains, followed by Rasch analysis to construct scales with acceptable psychometric properties, and generalized linear modeling to relate scales to experience and explore construct validity. Our substantive findings document the role of first- and second-hand experience of courts and lawyers on attitudes and show the importance of positive experiences and accounts of courts and lawyers in enhancing perceptions of accessibility.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"298-317"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12417","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144773426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Dispute Resolution in the Signaling Model: A Comparison of Arbitration Mechanisms 信令模型中的争议解决：仲裁机制的比较

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-05-27 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12420

Paul Pecorino, Michael Solomon, Mark Van Boening

{"title":"Dispute Resolution in the Signaling Model: A Comparison of Arbitration Mechanisms","authors":"Paul Pecorino, Michael Solomon, Mark Van Boening","doi":"10.1111/jels.12420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12420","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>We conduct an experimental analysis of signaling games using three models of arbitration. In the signaling model, the informed party in the dispute makes a settlement demand to the uninformed party. In conventional arbitration (CA), the arbitrator is free to impose her preferred settlement on the disputing parties. In Final Offer Arbitration (FOA), each party submits a proposal to the arbitrator who must choose one of the two submitted proposals. In one version of FOA we consider, settlement bargaining (which occurs separately from proposal submission) occurs prior to the submission of proposals and in one version it occurs after. We find the lowest dispute rate in CA and the highest dispute rate in FOA when settlement negotiations take place prior to the submission of proposals. The difference in dispute rates across these two mechanisms is 10 percentage points, which is about 25% of the average dispute rate. One factor in the lower CA dispute rate is that fewer disputes result from anomalous demands, which in turn may be a function of the simplicity of the mechanism compared with FOA.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"361-377"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144773974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Distance Factor in Remedies 补救措施中的距离因素

IF 1.3 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-05-06 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12414

Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, Ilana Ritov

{"title":"The Distance Factor in Remedies","authors":"Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, Ilana Ritov","doi":"10.1111/jels.12414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12414","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article proposes a new classification of legal remedies that cuts across existing classifications. It argues that all remedies involving the transfer of resources are positioned along a continuum from close to remote, which determines their “distance factor.” The basic distinction is between remedies provided directly by the injurer to the injured and remedies that are provided through third parties. The article presents the results of two original, preregistered experiments designed to examine the effect of the distance factor on perceptions of, and preferences for, various remedies from the perspectives of both the injured and injurers. The experiments reveal that even when the remedy is monetary, both injured and injurers prefer the remedy with the smaller distance factor. Specifically, both parties believe that direct compensation leads to better outcomes than payment via a third party with regard to rectifying the harm done, granting satisfaction to the injured, treating the injured and injurer with respect, improving the bilateral relations, and increasing the injurer's sense of responsibility for the harm. These findings are relevant to the various goals that the law wishes to promote, such as corrective justice, economic efficiency, or distributive justice. They vindicate the importance of private law, offer a more attractive justification for it than the one offered by Civil Recourse Theory, and support pluralism in remedial modes.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"270-297"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12414","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144773945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Law, Justice and Reason-Giving 法律、正义与理性

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-04-29 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12412

Ori Katz, Eyal Zamir

{"title":"Law, Justice and Reason-Giving","authors":"Ori Katz, Eyal Zamir","doi":"10.1111/jels.12412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12412","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Reason-giving is a hallmark of judicial decision-making. However, many judicial decisions are not accompanied by detailed reasons—or any reasons at all. Judicial reason-giving serves various goals, including constraining judges' discretion. The very engagement in writing and the enhanced accountability that comes with the provision of written reasons are expected to foster more deliberative thinking and stricter adherence to legal norms. Several prior studies have investigated the influence of judicial reason-giving on judges' vulnerability to cognitive and other biases. But none have examined the effect of reason-giving on the inclination to deviate from formal legal rules in cases where there is a notable tension between the legal rules and the equities of the case in question (“hard cases”). This article reports on four novel, pre-registered experiments designed to test this important issue. The experiments also explored (1) the extent to which a precedent where the court deviated from the formal rule in a hard case affects the ruling in a subsequent “easy case” (one that lacks such tension)—and how reason-giving influences this effect, and (2) the extent to which a precedent where the court followed the formal rule in an easy case affects the ruling in a subsequent hard case—and how reason-giving influences this effect. The article discusses the policy implications of the findings and avenues for future research.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 2","pages":"243-266"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12412","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143926181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools Hallucination-Free吗?评估领先人工智能法律研究工具的可靠性

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-04-23 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12413

Varun Magesh, Faiz Surani, Matthew Dahl, Mirac Suzgun, Christopher D. Manning, Daniel E. Ho

{"title":"Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools","authors":"Varun Magesh, Faiz Surani, Matthew Dahl, Mirac Suzgun, Christopher D. Manning, Daniel E. Ho","doi":"10.1111/jels.12413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12413","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Legal practice has witnessed a sharp rise in products incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Such tools are designed to assist with a wide range of core legal tasks, from search and summarization of caselaw to document drafting. However, the large language models used in these tools are prone to “hallucinate,” or make up false information, making their use risky in high-stakes domains. Recently, certain legal research providers have touted methods such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as “eliminating” or “avoid[ing]” hallucinations, or guaranteeing “hallucination-free” legal citations. Because of the closed nature of these systems, systematically assessing these claims is challenging. In this article, we design and report on the first preregistered empirical evaluation of AI-driven legal research tools. We demonstrate that the providers' claims are overstated. While hallucinations are reduced relative to general-purpose chatbots (GPT-4), we find that the AI research tools made by LexisNexis (Lexis+ AI) and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Ask Practical Law AI) each hallucinate between 17% and 33% of the time. We also document substantial differences between systems in responsiveness and accuracy. Our article makes four key contributions. It is the first to assess and report the performance of RAG-based proprietary legal AI tools. Second, it introduces a comprehensive, preregistered dataset for identifying and understanding vulnerabilities in these systems. Third, it proposes a clear typology for differentiating between hallucinations and accurate legal responses. Last, it provides evidence to inform the responsibilities of legal professionals in supervising and verifying AI outputs, which remains a central open question for the responsible integration of AI into law.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 2","pages":"216-242"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143926188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Assessing the Conservative Nature of the Supreme Court of Japan via Ideal Point Estimation of Justices 从法官的理想点估计看日本大法院的保守性

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-04-07 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12411

Hirofumi Miwa

{"title":"Assessing the Conservative Nature of the Supreme Court of Japan via Ideal Point Estimation of Justices","authors":"Hirofumi Miwa","doi":"10.1111/jels.12411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12411","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Japan is an intriguing case in the literature of judicial independence because of the Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) long-lasting one-party dominance in government—which, in theory, leads to low independence. Although scholars have found plentiful anecdotal observations implying the LDP's judicial control, quantitative evidence remains scarce. Focusing on the Supreme Court as the first step, this study provides a new dataset on justices' ideal points through an extensive compilation of justices' voting data and application of the dynamic item response theory model. I validate the estimates' interpretability as ideological positions. The results present several novel findings: justices with a career-judge background are relatively conservative; the Chief Justice tends to be particularly conservative; the conservative camp has tended to hold on to a court majority since the 1960s; and the government's partisanship, to some degree, influences appointed justices' positions. These results reinforce scholars' views that Japan's court leans conservatively and aligns with the LDP, with implications for judicial independence in Japan.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 2","pages":"186-215"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143925846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Perception Pending: What Do Patents Signal to Consumers? 待定认知：专利向消费者发出了什么信号？

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Pub Date : 2025-04-03 DOI: 10.1111/jels.12415

Alexander Billy, Neel Sukhatme

{"title":"Perception Pending: What Do Patents Signal to Consumers?","authors":"Alexander Billy, Neel Sukhatme","doi":"10.1111/jels.12415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12415","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Patent law encourages inventors to label their products as “patented,” to mark their legal status and potentially secure monetary damages from infringing competitors. We examine whether such labels might have a separate and direct impact on consumers, by affecting how they view patented products and influencing what they purchase. We develop and conduct two experiments to isolate the impact of patent status on consumer behavior. In an online randomized experiment, we demonstrate how increasing the salience of patent status heightens consumers' beliefs that products are innovative and well made. We also reveal consumers' surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the patenting process and what being patented means. Despite this informed perspective, consumers are not more inclined to buy patented products. To determine if these results hold in a real-world setting, we conduct a field experiment at a small retail pharmacy chain. Using scanner data spanning over 4 years, we find no evidence that consumers respond to increased patent salience. Our collective results suggest that while consumers view patented products as more innovative and well made, these positive attributes do not necessarily translate into heightened purchasing behavior. Our research suggests that patent marking might often serve only a legal, rather than a marketing, function. This has implications for patent policy, including the relevance of patent salience in damage analyses and litigation strategies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 2","pages":"163-184"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12415","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143925911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0