Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

{"title":"A Faustian bargain? Rethinking the role of debt in law students' career choices","authors":"Steven A. Boutcher,&nbsp;Jason N. Houle,&nbsp;Anna Raup-Kounovksy,&nbsp;Carroll Seron","doi":"10.1111/jels.12344","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12344","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in government and public interest (GPI) law, where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multiwave, panel survey of law students, we take advantage of a unique tuition remission intervention that occurred at the founding of University of California Irvine (UCI) Law, resulting in a natural, quasi-experiment. Using ordinary least squares regression and an instrumental variables approach, we ask whether law student debt influences the likelihood that students will (1) launch their careers in the GPI and (2) aspire to the GPI sector 5 years after graduation. We find little to no evidence that student debt is a barrier to a graduate's decision to take a position in the GPI sector at career launch or that debt is a factor in a graduate's career aspirations at UCI law school during the study period. These counterintuitive findings provoke new questions about our understanding of debt in the context of legal education and the types of interventions that might facilitate greater entry into the public sector.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"166-195"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47333984","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":"Racial bias as a multi-stage, multi-actor problem: An analysis of pretrial detention","authors":"Joshua Grossman,&nbsp;Julian Nyarko,&nbsp;Sharad Goel","doi":"10.1111/jels.12343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12343","url":null,"abstract":"<p>After arrest, criminal defendants are often detained before trial to mitigate potential risks to public safety. There is widespread concern, however, that detention decisions are biased against racial minorities. When assessing potential racial discrimination in pretrial detention, past studies have typically worked to quantify the extent to which the ultimate judicial decision is conditioned on the defendant's race. Although often useful, this approach suffers from three important limitations. First, it ignores the multi-stage nature of the pretrial process, in which decisions and recommendations are made over multiple court appearances that influence the final judgment. Second, it does not consider the multiple actors involved, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, each of whom have different responsibilities and incentives. Finally, a narrow focus on disparate <i>treatment</i> fails to consider potential disparate <i>impact</i> arising from facially neutral policies and practices. Addressing these limitations, here we present a framework for quantifying disparate impact in multi-stage, multi-actor settings, illustrating our approach using 10 years of data on pretrial decisions from a federal district court. We find that Hispanic defendants are released at lower rates than white defendants of similar safety and nonappearance risk. We trace these disparities to decisions of assistant US attorneys at the initial hearings, decisions driven in part by a statutory mandate that lowers the procedural bar for moving for detention of defendants in certain types of cases. We also find that the Pretrial Services Agency recommends detention of Black defendants at higher rates than white defendants of similar risk, though we do not find evidence that these recommendations translate to disparities in actual release rates. Finally, we find that traditional disparate treatment analyses yield more modest evidence of discrimination in pretrial detention outcomes, highlighting the value of our more expansive analysis for identifying, and ultimately remediating, unjust disparities in the pretrial process. We conclude with a discussion of how risk-based threshold release policies could help to mitigate observed disparities, and the estimated impact of various policies on violation rates in the partner jurisdiction.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"86-133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50149243","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":"Managerial litigation risk and corporate investment efficiency: Evidence from universal demand laws","authors":"Leonard Leye Li,&nbsp;Gary S. Monroe,&nbsp;Jeff Coulton","doi":"10.1111/jels.12340","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12340","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We examine the effect of managerial litigation risk on corporate investment efficiency. Exploiting the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States and employing a stacked regression approach, we find that the exogenous reduction in litigation risk induced by UD laws leads to lower investment efficiency. Our results are robust to the use of alternative partitioning variables and variations in sample composition. We also find that the decrease in investment sensitivity and excessive risk-taking are channels through which the reduced litigation rights lead to less efficient investments. Our results support the notion that weakened shareholder litigation rights lead to more severe agency conflicts and thus less efficient investment decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"196-232"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12340","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43374517","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":"One judge to rule them all: Single-member courts as an answer to delays in criminal trials","authors":"Konstantinos Kalliris,&nbsp;Theodore Alysandratos","doi":"10.1111/jels.12341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12341","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that single-member panels are as efficient as three-member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"233-268"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12341","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50119162","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":"JD-Next: A valid and reliable tool to predict diverse students' success in law school","authors":"Jessica Findley,&nbsp;Adriana Cimetta,&nbsp;Heidi Legg Burross,&nbsp;Katherine C. Cheng,&nbsp;Matt Charles,&nbsp;Cayley Balser,&nbsp;Ran Li,&nbsp;Christopher Robertson","doi":"10.1111/jels.12342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12342","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Admissions tests have increasingly come under attack by those seeking to broaden access and reduce disparities in higher education. Meanwhile, in other sectors there is a movement towards “work-sample” or “proximal” testing. Especially for underrepresented students, the goal is to measure not just the accumulated knowledge and skills that they would bring <i>to</i> a new academic program, but also their ability to grow and learn <i>through</i> the program. The JD-Next is a fully online, noncredit, 7- to 10-week course to train potential JD students in case reading and analysis skills, prior to their first year of law school. This study tests the validity and reliability of the JD-Next exam as a potential admissions tool for juris doctor programs of education. (In a companion article, we report on the efficacy of the course for preparing students for law school.) In 2019, we recruited a national sample of potential JD students, enriched for racial/ethnic diversity, along with a sample of volunteers at one university (<i>N</i> = 62). In 2020, we partnered with 17 law schools around the country to recruit a cohort of their incoming law students (<i>N</i> = 238). At the end of the course, students were incentivized to take and perform well on an exam that we graded with a standardized methodology. We collected first-semester grades as an outcome variable, and compared JD-Next exam properties to legacy exams now used by law schools (the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), including converted GRE scores). We found that the JD-Next exam was a valid and reliable predictor of law school performance, comparable to legacy exams. For schools ranked outside the Top 50, we found that the legacy exams lacked significant incremental validity in our sample, but the JD-Next exam provided a significant advantage. We also replicated known, substantial racial and ethnic disparities on the legacy exam scores, but estimate smaller, nonsignificant score disparities on the JD-Next exam. Together this research suggests that, as an admissions tool, the JD-Next exam may reduce the risk that capable students will be excluded from legal education and the legal profession.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"134-165"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12342","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50119158","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":"Asymmetric review of qualified immunity appeals","authors":"Alexander A. Reinert","doi":"10.1111/jels.12339","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jels.12339","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article presents results from the most comprehensive study to date of the resolution of qualified immunity in the federal courts of appeals and the US Supreme Court. By analyzing more than 4000 appellate decisions issued between 2004 and 2015, this study provides novel insights into how courts of appeals resolve arguments for qualified immunity. Moreover, by conducting an unprecedented analysis of certiorari practice, this study reveals how the US Supreme Court has exercised its discretionary jurisdiction in the area of qualified immunity. The data presented here have significant implications for civil rights enforcement and the uniformity of federal law. They show that qualified immunity, when deployed, often bars relief for plaintiffs. Moreover, they show that courts of appeals reverse decisions to deny qualified immunity far more often than they reverse decisions to grant qualified immunity, and that this asymmetric review is correlated with traditional indicators of judicial ideology, among other variables. Significantly, the data also suggest that the asymmetric review that characterizes appellate decisions is also present in the Supreme Court's certiorari practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"4-85"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49479321","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":"Can moral framing drive insurance enrollment in the\u0000 United States\u0000 ?","authors":"W. Epstein, C. Robertson, D. Yokum, H. Ko, Kevin H. Wilson, Monica Ramos, Katherine Kettering, Margaret Houtz","doi":"10.1111/jels.12334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42695379","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":"Examining the effects of antidiscrimination laws on children in the foster care and adoption systems","authors":"Netta Barak‐Corren, Yoav Kantor, N. Tebbe","doi":"10.1111/jels.12333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12333","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44681087","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":"Stay at home if you can: COVID-19 stay-at-home guidelines and local crime","authors":"Carlos Díaz, Sebastian Fossati, Nicolás Trajtenberg","doi":"10.1111/jels.12336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12336","url":null,"abstract":"Government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on mobility patterns with implications for public safety and crime dynamics in countries across the planet. This paper explores the effect of stay-at-home guidelines on thefts and robberies at the neighborhood level in a Latin American city. We exploit neighborhood heterogeneity in the ability of working adults to comply with stay-at-home recommendations and use difference-in-differences and event-study designs to identify the causal effect of COVID-19 mobility restrictions on the monthly number of thefts and robberies reported to police across neighborhoods in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 2020. Our results show that neighborhoods with a higher share of residents with work-from-home jobs experienced a larger reduction in reported thefts in relation to neighborhoods with a lower share of residents with work-from-home jobs. In contrast, both groups of neighborhoods experienced a similar reduction in the number of reported robberies. These findings cast light on opportunity structures for crime but also on how crime during the pandemic has disproportionately affected more vulnerable areas and households.","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138516913","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":"Should patients use online reviews to pick their doctors and hospitals?","authors":"David A. Hyman, Jing Liu, Bernard S. Black","doi":"10.1111/jels.12338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12338","url":null,"abstract":"We compare the online reviews of 221 “Questionable” Illinois and Indiana physicians with multiple paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions with matched control physicians with clean records. Across five prominent online rating services, we find small, mostly insignificant differences in star ratings and written reviews for Questionable versus control physicians. Only one rating service (Healthgrades) reports on paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary actions and it misses more than 90% of these actions. We also evaluate the online ratings of 171 Illinois hospitals and find that their ratings are largely uncorrelated with the share of hospital-affiliated physicians with paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions. Online ratings have limited utility in helping patients avoid physicians with troubled medical malpractice and disciplinary records, and steering patients away from hospitals at which more physicians have paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions.","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"72 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495572","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}