Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

{"title":"The limits of diplomacy by treaty: Evidence from China's bilateral investment treaty program","authors":"Adam Chilton,&nbsp;Weijia Rao","doi":"10.1111/jels.12399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12399","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The web of over 3000 Bilateral Investment Treaties (“BITs”) is the primary body of international law regulating cross-border investments. Research suggests that these treaties may have had a limited impact on promoting new investments, but that they still may have helped to improve countries' political relationships. In this paper, we document that this pattern was reversed for one of the most prolific signers of BITs: China. Using a stacked-event research design, we find that Chinese BITs are associated with an increase in Bilateral Foreign Direct Investment Flows but a divergence in voting patterns at the United Nations. We then explore two explanations for why the Chinese BIT program led to increased investment while also producing foreign policy divergence: that the domestic political costs of economic engagement with China push countries away, and that there are offsetting international pressures that have stronger pulls than China's efforts. We find no support for the domestic political costs explanation, but we do find evidence that the countries that received increased aid from the United States after signing a Chinese BIT had greater foreign policy divergence with China.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 4","pages":"1023-1101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142674048","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}

{"title":"Foreword to JELS special issue","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/jels.12403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12403","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 4","pages":"714-715"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142674291","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}

{"title":"The impact of legal representation in Israeli traffic courts: Addressing selection bias and generalizability problems","authors":"Rabeea Assy,&nbsp;Tomer Carmel","doi":"10.1111/jels.12392","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12392","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates the impact of legal representation on the process and outcomes of legal proceedings, focusing on Israeli traffic courts dealing with simple traffic offenses. It finds that legal representation significantly increased defendants' prospects of obtaining plea bargains and of avoiding demerits points. However, legally represented defendants were also exposed to higher fines compared to self-represented defendants. Since points are typically the primary concern for defendants, we contend that legal representation improved case outcomes, overall. Considering the simplicity of the process, the minimal legal expertise required, and the low stakes involved, the representation effect was unexpectedly robust. This effect may potentially be even stronger in more complex cases and where the stakes are higher. Unlike previous observational studies, this study reduces the risks associated with selection bias and produces findings that are more credible and potentially generalizable to other contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"532-576"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12392","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141517559","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}

{"title":"Private security and public police","authors":"Ben Grunwald,&nbsp;John Rappaport,&nbsp;Michael Berg","doi":"10.1111/jels.12393","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12393","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Private security officers outnumber police by a wide margin, and the gap may be growing. As cities have claimed to defund the police, many have quietly expanded their use of private security, reallocating spending from the public to the private sector. It is difficult to know what to make of these trends, largely because we know so little about what private security looks like on the ground. On one prevalent view of the facts, a shift from public to private security would mean little more than a change of uniform, as the two labor markets are deeply intertwined. Indeed, academics, the media, popular culture, and the police themselves all tell us that private security is some amalgam of a police retirement community and a dumping ground for disgraced former cops. But if, instead, private officers differ systematically from the public police—and crossover between the sectors is limited—then substitution from policing to private security could drastically change who is providing security services.</p><p>We bring novel data to bear on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in the State of Florida. By linking this dataset to similarly comprehensive information about public law enforcement, we have, for the first time, a nearly complete picture of the entire security labor market in one state. We report two principal findings. First, the public and private security markets are predominantly characterized by occupational segregation, not integration. The individuals who compose the private security sector differ markedly from the public police; they are, for example, significantly less likely to be white men. We also find that few private officers, roughly 2%, have previously worked in public policing, and even fewer will go on to policing in the future. Second, while former police make up a small share of all private security, roughly a quarter of cops who do cross over have been fired from a policing job. In fact, fired police officers are nearly as likely to land in private security as to find another policing job, and a full quarter end up in one or the other. We explore the implications of these findings, including intersections with police abolition and the future of policing, at the paper's close.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"428-481"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12393","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141501121","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}

{"title":"The influence of the race of defendant and the race of victim on capital charging and sentencing in California","authors":"Catherine M. Grosso,&nbsp;Jeffrey Fagan,&nbsp;Michael Laurence","doi":"10.1111/jels.12390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12390","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 recognized racial and ethnic discrimination as a basis for relief in capital cases, expressly permitting several types of statistical evidence to be introduced. This statewide study of the influence of race and ethnicity on the application of capital punishment contributes to this evidence. We draw on data from over 27,000 murder and manslaughter convictions in California state courts between 1978 and 2002. Using multiple methods, we found significant racial and ethnic disparities in charging and sentencing decisions. Controlling for defendant culpability and specific statutory aggravators, we show that Black and Latinx defendants and all defendants convicted of killing at least one white victim are substantially more likely to be sentenced to death. We further examined the role that race and ethnicity have in decision-making at various points in the criminal justice system. We found that prosecutors were significantly more likely to seek death against defendants who kill white victims, and that juries were significantly more likely to sentence those defendants to death. The magnitude of the race of the defendant and race of the victim effects is substantially higher than in prior studies in other states and in single-jurisdiction research. The results show an entrenched pattern of racial disparities in charging and sentencing that privileges white victim cases, as well as patterns of racial disparities in who is charged and sentenced to death in California courts that are the natural result of California's capacious statutory definition of death eligibility, which permits virtually unlimited discretion for charging and sentencing decisions. This pattern of racial preferences illustrates the social costs of California's failure to follow the Supreme Court's directive in <i>Furman v Georgia</i> to narrow the application of capital punishment over 50 years ago.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"482-531"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12390","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141967920","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}

{"title":"Privacy decision-making and the effects of privacy choice architecture: Experiments toward the design of behaviorally-aware privacy regulation","authors":"Christopher Jon Sprigman,&nbsp;Stephan Tontrup","doi":"10.1111/jels.12391","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12391","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The current notice and choice privacy framework fails to empower individuals in effectively making their own privacy choices. In this Article we offer evidence from three novel experiments showing that at the core of this failure is a cognitive error. Notice and choice caters to a heuristic that people employ to make privacy decisions. This heuristic is meant to distinguish between a party's good or bad intent in face-to-face-situations. In the online context, it distorts privacy decision-making and leaves potential disclosers vulnerable to exploitation.</p><p>From our experimental evidence exploring the heuristic's effect, we conclude that privacy law must become more behaviorally aware. Specifically, privacy law must be redesigned to intervene in the cognitive mechanisms that keep individuals from making better privacy decisions. A behaviorally-aware privacy regime must centralize, standardize and simplify the framework for making privacy choices.</p><p>To achieve these goals, we propose a master privacy template which requires consumers to define their privacy preferences in advance—doing so avoids presenting the consumer with a concrete counterparty, and this, in turn, prevents them from applying the intent heuristic and reduces many other biases that affect privacy decision-making. Our data show that blocking the heuristic enables consumers to consider relevant privacy cues and be considerate of externalities their privacy decisions cause.</p><p>The master privacy template provides a much more effective platform for regulation. Through the master template the regulator can set the standard for automated communication between user clients and website interfaces, a facility which we expect to enhance enforcement and competition about privacy terms.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"577-631"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141354441","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}

{"title":"The value of legal recourse in sovereign bond markets: Evidence from Argentina","authors":"Sebastian M. Saiegh,&nbsp;Glen Biglaiser","doi":"10.1111/jels.12384","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12384","url":null,"abstract":"<p>If sovereign immunity waivers and clauses calling for litigation abroad reduce the risk of expropriation, bonds governed by foreign law should, ceteris paribus, trade at a premium compared to bonds issued under domestic law. In 2020, Argentina exchanged a panoply of bonds with different currencies, maturity and coupon structure for pairs of bonds that are identical except for their governing law. We leverage these “twin” bonds to identify the effect of legal jurisdiction on sovereign debt prices. Our findings indicate that foreign-law bonds consistently trade at higher prices and are primarily held by long-term investors. These results suggest that market participants price certain legal terms (e.g., governing law) in sovereign debt, and investors expect to face less credit risk under bonds governed by foreign law, either due to a lower risk of selective default or higher recovery rate in foreign courts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"669-709"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12384","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140930471","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}

{"title":"A statistical approach to law school citation rankings","authors":"Joshua Fischman","doi":"10.1111/jels.12381","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12381","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops a statistical approach for inferring faculty quality from citation counts and determining when differences among law schools are significant. Statistical tests demonstrate that the distribution of citations within faculties closely follows the lognormal distribution, subject to small adjustments. This suggests a simple test for comparing faculties: whether they could be drawn from lognormal distributions with the same log mean. Under this approach, the geometric mean of citations is the most efficient measure for summarizing faculty quality. Using citation data collected from HeinOnline, this article provides a citation ranking for 195 law schools in the United States. Most differences between peer schools are statistically insignificant, and confidence intervals on citation ranks are extremely wide. Except for the highest-ranked faculties, citation rankings provide little information on the relative quality of faculties.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"632-668"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12381","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140677165","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}

{"title":"Does the 1L curriculum make a difference?","authors":"David A. Hyman,&nbsp;Jing Liu,&nbsp;Joshua C. Teitelbaum","doi":"10.1111/jels.12383","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12383","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Georgetown Law's Curriculum B (also known as Section 3) offers a unique opportunity to study an alternative 1L curriculum. The standard 1L curriculum has been around for decades and is still offered at the vast majority of US law schools. Leaders in the legal academy often talk about experimenting with the 1L curriculum, but hardly anyone does it. Georgetown Law has. We study whether Georgetown's Curriculum B yields measurable differences in student outcomes. Our empirical design leverages the fact that enrollment in Curriculum B is done by lottery when it is oversubscribed—meaning our study is effectively a randomized controlled trial. We measure treatment effects of Curriculum B by comparing outcomes of students who received the treatment (Curriculum B) with outcomes of students who received the placebo (Curriculum A) but wanted the treatment. Because students in both the treatment and control groups elected to enroll in Curriculum B, our empirical design overcomes the issue of selection bias. We find that taking Curriculum B decreases students' performance in two business law electives (Corporations and Securities Regulation) and reduces the rate at which they graduate with Latin honors. In addition, we find that it increases students' propensity to take certain public law electives and decreases their propensity to take certain business law electives. We further find that taking Curriculum B decreases students' likelihood of working in the private sector (law firm or business/industry), increases their likelihood of working in the public sector (government or public interest) or doing a judicial clerkship, and reduces their average annual salary. At the same, however, we find no statistically significant effects on other outcomes, including students' cumulative grade point average, their chances of passing the bar exam or being employed 10 months after graduation, or their rate or amount of alumni giving.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 2","pages":"375-423"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140813001","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}

{"title":"Lawyers' legal aid participation: A qualitative and quantitative analysis","authors":"Ching-fang Hsu,&nbsp;Ivan Kan-hsueh Chiang,&nbsp;Yun-chien Chang","doi":"10.1111/jels.12385","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12385","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article develops a framework to understand the legal profession's participation in providing services to indigent clients. Our theory is based on two factors: whether lawyers have successful practices, and whether the legal aid delivered to indigent clients is free or below market price. Pro bono signals moral high ground in the profession. Conversely, a regime in which legal assistance is provided at a discounted market price (“low bono”), an under-explored area in the literature, attracts less competitive attorneys, and doing legal aid cases is perceived as signifying incompetence in one's professional capacity. Using a unique, comprehensive data set on all legal aid lawyers in Taiwan (nearly 4000), two nationwide attorney surveys, and 143 in-depth interviews with practicing lawyers across the country, we offer the first comprehensive empirical analysis of legal aid lawyers and explain that the design of a legal aid regime attracts lawyers of different hemispheres into the endeavor.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 2","pages":"337-374"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140687465","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}