Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

{"title":"Consent searches: Evaluating the usefulness of a common and highly discretionary police practice","authors":"Megan Dias,&nbsp;Derek A. Epp,&nbsp;Marcel Roman,&nbsp;Hannah L. Walker","doi":"10.1111/jels.12377","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12377","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We analyze the consequences of using driver consent as a basis for initializing a traffic stop-and-search compared to those searches based on probable cause. We find that consent searches are less likely to result in contraband recovery than are probable cause searches. Moreover, police agencies with a relatively higher reliance on consent searches find similar amounts of contraband and make a similar number of arrests as agencies doing much less searching but with a greater reliance on probable cause. These patterns are amplified along racial lines, and there is no discernible relationship between the use of consent searches and crime. We also provide causal evidence that corroborate these observational findings by examining the consequences of a Texas Highway Patrol policy, which suddenly increased the consent search rate in two South Texas counties. We show the contraband recovery rate discontinuously decreases when the consent search rate discontinuously increases.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"35-91"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12377","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138951117","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":"Constitutional accountability for police shootings","authors":"Greg Goelzhauser","doi":"10.1111/jels.12378","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12378","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Constitutional accountability for police shootings is imposed in part through civil rights lawsuits alleging Fourth Amendment violations, but little is known about how judges evaluate these claims. I introduce original data on all federal circuit court decisions resolving Fourth Amendment excessive force claims in police shooting cases over three decades. The quasi-random assignment of a majority-Republican panel substantially increases the probability of circuit courts finding a police shooting to be constitutional. Capturing law's influence by mapping case facts to the three-part analytical framework delineated by the Supreme Court in <i>Graham v. Connor</i>, I find that active resistance and threat immediacy are associated with increases in the probability of finding police shootings to be constitutional, but crime severity is not systematically associated with outcomes. In addition, there is evidence that law conditions the effect of politics, with increases in latent Fourth Amendment reasonableness narrowing the partisan outcome gap in constitutional assessments. The quasi-random assignment of a Black judge does not impact outcomes. The results have important implications for police oversight and longstanding debates in judicial politics over the prevalence of panel effects and the extent to which law influences decision making.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"92-108"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138824776","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":"Strategic subdelegation","authors":"Brian D. Feinstein,&nbsp;Jennifer Nou","doi":"10.1111/jels.12369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Appointed leaders of administrative agencies routinely record subdelegations of governmental authority to civil servants. That appointees willingly cede authority in this way presents a puzzle, at least at first glance: Why do these appointees assign their power to civil servants insulated by merit protection laws, that is, to employees over whom they have limited control? This article develops and tests a theory to explain this behavior. Using original data on appointee-to-civil servant delegations and a measure of the ideological distance between these two groups of actors, we show that appointees are more willing to vest power in civil servants when the two groups are more closely aligned. They are particularly likely to do so in the last months of a presidential administration, prior to a transition to a new set of appointees from a different party. Essentially, appointees strategically devolve authority to ideologically similar civil servants to entrench their views in the face of oppositional future presidential administrations. Further, judicial doctrine and interest-group politics can make existing subdelegations difficult to reverse. This stickiness adds to the strategic value of subdelegations as a means of projecting preferences into future administrations. These findings raise important implications for administrative law and governance. One conventional wisdom on intra-agency dynamics considers appointees and civil servants as rivals. Relatedly, studies of personnel practices focus on strategies to empower appointees and sideline civil servants. This article, by contrast, shows how appointees and civil servants can act as strategic partners under certain conditions. At a time when leading political figures propose fundamental changes to the civil service, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics between political appointees and civil servants.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"746-817"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138432342","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":"Secured credit and bankruptcy resolution","authors":"Barry E. Adler,&nbsp;Vedran Capkun","doi":"10.1111/jels.12370","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12370","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Accepted wisdom holds that secured creditors favor liquidation of a debtor in bankruptcy even where the debtor may be more valuable as a going concern. This is false wisdom, however. Holders of senior claims can be expected to favor liquidation <i>prior</i> to a debtor's bankruptcy because the return on such claims are capped by the amount owed while debtor asset values fluctuate. But bankruptcy is a day of reckoning that can eliminate a creditor's exposure to value fluctuation. For this reason, we expect that modern bankruptcy practice, with the secured creditor often firmly in control, does not unduly encourage liquidation. In fact, we expect any bias to favor reorganization, which can be manipulated for the benefit of any party in control of the bankruptcy process. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. In a broad study of US corporate bankruptcy cases, we find that secured credit is positively and significantly correlated with the reorganization of insolvent debtors.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"719-745"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135390284","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":"Measuring law's normative force","authors":"Kevin L. Cope","doi":"10.1111/jels.12364","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12364","url":null,"abstract":"<p>An important question in legal theory and policy is when people are willing to put aside their policy preferences to uphold higher-order legal values. That is, when does constitutional or international law, for instance, have “normative force”? Around two-dozen experimental studies have attempted to measure this question empirically, but their designs contain an inherent limitation. While they are interested in gauging the effect of internalizing a norm, they measure only the effect of exposure to that norm. This is significant because subjects in the treatment group whose priors are strongly contrary to the treatment message on the legality of a policy may effectively be “treatment resistant”: it is difficult to successfully treat them because their prior beliefs on the issue are entrenched; as a result, they simply do not believe the treatment message. This treatment failure attenuates any effects, and where a significant portion of the treatment and/or control group is not successfully treated, the results will be biased toward small, null, or even backfire findings. This article first formally models the mechanism underlying experiments on law's normative force. I then demonstrate a methodological solution to the problem of treatment resistance. By using the experimental treatment as an instrumental variable and employing a post-treatment treatment-uptake test, the researcher can estimate the causal effect of the real explanatory variable of interest: sincerely holding a belief about a policy's higher-order lawfulness. Using new data from a 2022 survey experiment conducted on US residents, I illustrate this method for three constitutional or international law issues. The theoretical and empirical results together suggest that backfire effects documented by some studies do not reflect a tepid or negative response against the legal source per se, but rather reflect treatment resistance. These findings suggest that we should re-evaluate the existing body of experimental studies on law's normative force, and they should prompt researchers to reconsider how we conduct future research in this domain.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"1005-1044"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12364","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135681658","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":"Gender gaps in legal education: The impact of class participation assessments","authors":"Kenneth Khoo,&nbsp;Jaclyn Neo","doi":"10.1111/jels.12372","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12372","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The gender gap is a well-studied phenomenon in education policy. Although prior research has illustrated the presence of this gap in US Law Schools, questions remain as to whether these findings are generalizable to other jurisdictions where national, cultural, historical, institutional, and societal norms are substantially different. In this article, we investigate the presence and nature of a gender gap in one of Asia's leading law schools, the National University of Singapore (“NUS Law”). Employing a novel dataset with granular data on student, instructor, course, and component characteristics, we provide evidence that the gender gap persists over numerous cohorts of students. Despite controlling for a wide range of covariates such as standardized entry scores, income proxies, and a large array of fixed effects, female students at NUS Law systemically underperform their male counterparts across numerous metrics of law school performance. To investigate potential causal mechanisms behind the gender gap, we exploit a natural experiment in which NUS Law randomly assigned first- and second-year students to a range of compulsory courses with different class participation assessment weights. We provide evidence that female students who were assigned to courses with larger class participation weights had relatively lower class participation scores when compared to their male counterparts. Our work suggests that pedagogical policy should consider the choice of assessment modes with a view to narrowing the gender gap in legal education. Our study is distinctive within existing studies on the relationship between gender and class participation in legal education as it utilizes a comprehensive dataset of student scores, instead of relying on observational studies and self-reporting surveys which are more commonly used.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"1070-1137"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12372","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135315826","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":"Paid medical malpractice claims: How strongly does the past predict the future?","authors":"Kowsar Yousefi,&nbsp;Bernard Black,&nbsp;David A. Hyman","doi":"10.1111/jels.12371","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12371","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When does the past predict the future? In financial markets, warnings that “past results are no guarantee of future performance” are ubiquitous. But in multiple fields (including professional sports, insurance, and criminal law), it is widely believed that the past is a useful guide to the future. Does that insight apply to medical malpractice (“med mal”)? Using a novel dataset (which includes detailed data on all licensed physicians and all paid claims in Illinois over a 25-year period), we study whether past paid med mal claims, physician characteristics, and specialty predict future paid med mal claims. After controlling for other factors, physicians with a single prior paid claim have a fourfold higher risk of future claims than physicians with zero prior paid claims. The more prior paid claims a physician has, the higher the likelihood of a future paid claim. Multiple factors (male gender, having an MD, attending a non-U.S. medical school, practicing in a high-claim-risk specialty, and mid-career status [6–15 prior years of experience]) predict a higher likelihood of having one or more paid med mal claims.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"818-851"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135368686","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 role of cable news hosts in public support for Supreme Court decisions","authors":"Scott Simon Boddery,&nbsp;Damon Cann,&nbsp;Laura Moyer,&nbsp;Jeff Yates","doi":"10.1111/jels.12367","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12367","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the current media environment, Americans increasingly tune into cable news programs with distinct ideological brands. This paper extends existing work on media source cues to coverage of the US Supreme Court, an institution which depends entirely on media outlets to communicate its rulings to the American public. We argue that the source cues associated with celebrity media personalities serve as a heuristic that helps individuals form their opinions about public policy. Using a nationwide survey experiment with over 2000 respondents, we find that commentary on Supreme Court decisions from cable news hosts affects public agreement with the Court's rulings, with key differences between how liberal and conservative respondents respond under certain conditions. While unexpected positions espoused by in-group messengers shift the views of liberals and conservatives alike, signals from out-group messengers yield more of an effect for conservatives than for liberals. Our results show that counter-stereotypical (unexpected) position taking has a powerful impact on public perceptions of policy outcomes and suggest that well-known media figures may have an important role in mitigating ideological polarization in America.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"1045-1069"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135758659","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 effects of price transparency and debt collection policies on intentions to consume recommended health care: A randomized vignette experiment","authors":"Christopher T. Robertson,&nbsp;Wendy Netter Epstein,&nbsp;Hansoo Ko","doi":"10.1111/jels.12368","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12368","url":null,"abstract":"<p>New laws promote price transparency in health care, though effects on patient decision-making are not known. Price disclosure may increase the salience of cost and cause lower-income patients to decline recommended care, worsening inequities in health outcomes. Whether patients perceive a disclosed cost as higher or lower than their expectations may also affect care decisions, but has not been studied. Scholars and policymakers have paid much less attention to the question of whether patients will have to pay the prices charged (whether disclosed or not), and how expectations regarding collections may also affect healthcare consumption. Some hospitals aggressively collect on unpaid medical bills. Others hospitals do not. Actively disclosing collection policies (whether aggressive or protective) could magnify or counteract effects of price disclosures, especially for low-income patients. To test the effect of price disclosure and debt-collection disclosures on willingness to obtain recommended care, we recruited a nationally representative sample (<i>N</i> = 2997) and deployed a full factorial, controlled experiment in a standardized clinical vignette model. We find that disclosing a higher-than-anticipated price increases the probability of declining recommended care (odds ratio = 1.900), with larger effects for low-income individuals. Even more, disclosing aggressive collections increases the risk of declining care (odds ratio = 4.493), at higher rates for low-income patients. Where patients fear collections, but do not know prices, they are most likely to decline care. Disclosure of an aggressive collections policy makes patients feel less informed, harms patient trust in providers, makes them feel that they were not treated fairly, and undermines their confidence in the value of their care. Mediation analysis shows that about half of the effect of collections risk is via these attitudinal variables.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"941-960"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136014297","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 market for general counsel","authors":"Dhruv Chand Aggarwal","doi":"10.1111/jels.12366","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12366","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper presents the first systematic descriptive study of the market for general counsel (GCs) in publicly traded US companies. Using a hand-collected dataset, I track the backgrounds and careers of 3409 GCs, and establish basic facts about the hiring, firing, demographics, and politics of inhouse counsel. Most GCs are outsiders to their companies, not having previously worked in subordinate positions within the legal department or served as external counsel. I find that the share of women GCs has risen sharply over time, with GCs now about five times as likely to be female as chief executive officers (CEOs). GCs have also become more Democratic-leaning over time, in sharp contrast to business-side employees such as CEOs. GC tenures have decreased significantly over time. Outsider GCs are especially likely to be fired from their positions, controlling for biographical details, firm financials, and alleged misconduct by their employer.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 4","pages":"895-940"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135899265","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}