Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

{"title":"Data-Driven Accommodations: Testing Religious Exemptions in Markets With Discrimination","authors":"Brady Earley","doi":"10.1111/jels.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70013","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When conflicts between religious wedding vendors and same-sex couples arise, courts and legislatures face a dilemma. Existing empirical work such as audit studies and field experiments shows that religious exemptions may lead to higher refusal rates for same-sex couples seeking wedding services. But judges are hesitant to use this empirical evidence to address these conflicts. Doing so appears to balance two harms: the same-sex couple's harm from being refused service against a religious wedding vendor's harm from being denied a religious accommodation. As a result, judges and lawmakers elude serious engagement with the empirical realities of these conflicts and make diverging assumptions about the underlying effects of religious exemptions on market access. This article proposes a novel method for courts and legislatures to address these conflicts with market-based evidence. This approach involves two parts: a catchment area analysis and a non-deceptive survey. The catchment area analysis relies on data from more than 29 million cell phone users to model consumer behavior. The distance customers will travel to a baker or florist proxies for their willingness to pay and thus suggests substitutability with alternative vendors. The catchment analysis here looks at five states (Arkansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Utah) with similarly rural population geographies but different mixes of religious freedom and nondiscrimination legal requirements. With this evidence of public accommodation markets, the second part of the method uses a non-deceptive survey to determine which bakers and florists have religious objections. Across the five states, 206 (85%) bakers and 660 (84%) florists agreed to take the survey which included two questions: (1) whether they made cakes or arranged flowers for weddings and (2) whether they would have any restrictions doing those things for a same-sex wedding due to a religious objection. After filtering out those who did not provide wedding services, six out of 149 bakeries (4%) and 45 out of 615 florists (7%) voiced objections with suggestive evidence that religious exemptions contributed to higher refusal rates in RFRA regimes (7%–18% for florists) compared to non-RFRA (3% for florists). Combined with the catchment area evidence, this analysis also shows which refusals would leave same-sex couples without a readily available alternative. On average, religious exemptions would produce material harm for 2% of consumers, but legal regimes that allow more localized lawmaking on these issues tend to see 1–2 percentage points less material harm. In sum, this approach shows how judges and lawmakers can use market-based evidence of material harm and thereby avoid balancing dignitary interests. Moreover, this study further indicates government—especially local governments—can accommodate religious objectors while administering public accommodation protections for same-sex couples and countering stigma.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"620-654"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.70013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449828","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":"Centered Advantage: A Geographic Measure of Partisan Fairness in Redistricting","authors":"Jeffrey T. Barton,&nbsp;Jon X. Eguia","doi":"10.1111/jels.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>We introduce a measure of partisan advantage in redistricting that takes into account a state's political geography. We define a party's geographic baseline seat-share as the proportion of the state's inhabitants for which the party would win a district centered around the inhabitant's location of residence. If the geographically ideal district for each voter is the most compact district with this voter at its center, a party's geographic baseline is the share of residents for whom the party wins their ideal district. A party's “Centered Advantage” is then the difference between the seats the party wins, and its geographic baseline number of seats. We compute the Centered Advantage for each legislative and congressional 2024 district map for all 50 states using precinct-level statewide elections results from 2016 to 2020. We observe that Democrats' geographic baseline increases with district size, and that Democrats are underrepresented in nationwide seat aggregates: the GOP has a Centered Advantage of about twenty-eight U.S. congressional seats, and over a hundred and fifty state legislative seats.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"422-437"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449868","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":"Chapter 13 Outcomes","authors":"Richard M. Hynes,&nbsp;Nathaniel Pattison","doi":"10.1111/jels.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Roughly 40% of bankrupt consumers file under Chapter 13. However, scholars have consistently criticized the chapter, sometimes calling for its elimination. Much of this criticism is motivated by the longstanding statistic that only one-third of Chapter 13 debtors obtain a discharge. Despite its prominence, much research underpinning this statistic is decades old and relies on small samples from a few bankruptcy courts. This paper reexamines the Chapter 13 discharge rate using the universe of recently filed bankruptcy cases. We first clarify that there are multiple plausible definitions of the “discharge rate.” Most prior literature measures the share of Chapter 13 cases that obtain a discharge in Chapter 13, and sometimes the discharge measure is expanded to include conversions to Chapter 7. By matching cases based on debtor names, we can observe whether a debtor receives a discharge in a subsequent case. Using this matching procedure, we introduce a new definition—the share of debtors who receive a discharge within 6 years of their Chapter 13 filing. We find that, for cases filed between 2008 and 2014, the discharge rate exceeds the oft-cited one-third statistic. Plausible national discharge rates vary from 40% (percent of Chapter 13 cases that obtain a discharge in Chapter 13) to 66% (percent of attorney-represented, first-time Chapter 13 debtors who obtain a discharge within 6 years). We also examine geographic patterns in discharge rates across districts and quantify the role of attorney representation, conversion rates, and repeat filing rates in explaining cross-district variation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"455-474"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.70003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449799","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":"Settlementality","authors":"Jessica Bregant,&nbsp;Jennifer K. Robbennolt,&nbsp;Verity Winship","doi":"10.1111/jels.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Is settlement of civil litigation good or bad for the legal system? Should we have more or less of it? Should settlement have a private or public purpose? Legal scholars and lawyers have considered these questions for decades, but very little is known about the views of ordinary people. This Article reports results from a nationally representative survey of over 1000 U.S. adults about what respondents thought settlement should look like. Respondents indicated, for example, the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like these: “A settlement between two parties is nobody's business but their own.” “Settling parties are more interested in money than justice.” Our findings convey nuanced lay intuitions about civil settlement, including mixed views about secrecy and settlements, and a tendency to want settling defendants to admit fault and apologize. We also discover that a striking number of lay observers prefer private resolution through contract to oversight by judges. Indeed, a considerable majority thought that at least 75% of disputes would be resolved by settlement in an ideal world, with 100% being the most common choice. The view that more cases should settle was both striking and complicated, highlighting the tension between private resolution of disputes and the public function of litigation and courts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"502-524"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.70008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449798","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":"Do Representative Payments Matter? An Empirical Study","authors":"Brian T. Fitzpatrick,&nbsp;Colton Cronin","doi":"10.1111/jels.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>For many decades, courts have awarded the representative plaintiffs who bring class actions an extra payment when the actions recover something for the class. It has long been thought that the payments are necessary to induce a class member to step forward and serve as a representative, and, without them, many class actions would go away. Indeed, we show that the payments had become all but ubiquitous in non-securities class actions. In 2020, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit became the only circuit to hold the payments unlawful. We test whether the Eleventh Circuit's decision caused a decline in class action filings there relative to other circuits. Much to our surprise, we did not find good evidence of a decline. We surmise that class members may be willing to serve as representatives without the extra compensation for selfless or principled reasons. Although, if true, this might not entirely defeat the case for representative payments, it certainly complicates that case because some believe the payments are not costless. As a result, our analysis may give courts and commentators additional reason to rethink their support for prevailing practices.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"414-421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145449818","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":"Income and Preferences for International Redistribution: Theory and Evidence","authors":"Yehonatan Givati","doi":"10.1111/jels.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How do preferences for international redistribution vary with income across countries? And within countries, are poor people more or less likely than rich people to support international redistribution? I develop a simple model which includes both domestic and international tax and transfer programs. I show that an increase in international redistribution comes at the expense of domestic redistribution. Still, I find that income is negatively correlated with support for international redistribution. Using new data on preferences for an international tax and transfer program in 29 countries, I first show a strong negative correlation across countries between income and preferences for international redistribution. Then, using individual level-data, and different measures of income, I show that in the U.S., and within other countries, income is negatively correlated with support for international redistribution. That is, poor people are more likely than rich people to support international redistribution.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 4","pages":"438-454"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145450025","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":"Hiding Lawyer Misconduct: Evidence From Florida","authors":"Kyle Rozema","doi":"10.1111/jels.12418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12418","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I study the effects of hiding lawyers' professional disciplinary records. To do so, I exploit the rollout of a 2007 policy that posts disciplinary records of Florida lawyers to their official online profiles but automatically removes them after 10 years. The policy only hides the online records of 65% of disciplined lawyers because the others have been disbarred before they qualify for removal. Lawyers who have their records hidden are 10 times more likely to offend after removal than lawyers with a clean record, but the removal itself has no causal effect on whether lawyers subsequently reoffend.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"22 3","pages":"318-344"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12418","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144774083","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 Diffusion of Deal Innovations in Complex Contractual Networks","authors":"Kristina Bishop,&nbsp;Matthew Jennejohn,&nbsp;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}

{"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}

{"title":"Measuring the Perceived (In)accessibility of Courts and Lawyers","authors":"Catrina Denvir,&nbsp;Nigel J. Balmer,&nbsp;Pascoe Pleasence,&nbsp;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}