Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

The American Bar Association has declared a “well-being crisis” among lawyers, but the empirical basis for this claim has been contested in recent years. This study systematically compares two high-quality, nationally representative surveys—the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)—to measure the prevalence of mental illness and alcohol misuse among lawyers. In both surveys, lawyers report elevated rates of alcohol misuse compared with the general public and similarly educated peers. The NHIS finds that lawyers experience psychological distress at rates lower than the general public and similar to, or moderately higher than, similarly educated peers. In the NSDUH, by contrast, more than 40% of lawyers report moderate or serious psychological distress in the past year. This rate is significantly higher than those reported by the general public, by similarly educated peers, and the rate found in the NHIS. While we cannot fully explain all of the differences between the two national surveys, we resolve some of these differences by studying sensitivity to instrument validation and calibration and closely aligning the measurements used in both surveys. To assess the remaining differences, we identify several advantages of the NSDUH, including the privacy of data-gathering methods, additional clinically validated mental illness measures, and results that are more consistent with other national surveys. The persistent divergences between the NHIS and NSDUH underscore the challenges of measuring mental illness and the importance of continued work on survey implementation, validation, analysis, and interpretation.

While the U.S. healthcare system typically imposes significant out-of-pocket costs on those with insurance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires full coverage of certain preventive health services. Still, one in four eligible Americans remains unscreened for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer. We hypothesize that a lack of awareness about the ACA's requirement contributes to this gap. Additionally, we investigate whether prior experiences with medical debt deter individuals from seeking even free care, a potential spillover effect of broader healthcare cost burdens. We conducted an online survey experiment with 3354 insured U.S. adults aged 30–74 with moderate household incomes ($30 k–$99 k). We determined whether each one qualified for a free cancer screen based on age and sex, and found that n = 1406 had not received at least one recommended cancer screening. Those participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design. In the “free care disclosure” (FCD) treatment, half were informed that ACA-required screenings are fully covered without copays or deductibles. In the “medical debt salience” (MDS) treatment, half were asked about their medical debt history before assessing screening intentions. In addition to measures of intention, the primary outcome was behavioral—whether participants requested a link to take a step toward screening, a proxy for screening behavior, which was not observed directly. As hypothesized, FCD increased screening-related behavior by 5 percentage points (p = 0.031), with effects varying by cancer type. Consistently, 45% of respondents indicated that “costs or coverage” was a common reason for not having gotten screening, and large majorities agreed that “going to the doctor or hospital can be dangerous financially,” “the American healthcare system is full of tricks and traps,” and “in America, healthcare is never really free” (80%, 65%, and 91% agreeing, respectively). MDS had no direct effect on behavior, but contrary to the hypothesis, individuals with medical debt were more likely to seek screening than those without (p = 0.011). These findings suggest that a lack of awareness about the law providing free preventive care is a significant barrier to screening. Proactive communication by clinicians or public health officials could save lives.

Many states bar employers from requiring or expecting employees to keep pay secret, and from retaliating against employees who discuss pay. In a nationally representative survey of 2369 US adults in 2021, people living in states with state laws barring pay secrecy reported more supportive attitudes regarding information-sharing and less concern about offending co-workers by asking about salary, but little to no difference in information-sharing behavior, beliefs or accuracy regarding the laws. Men were consistently more supportive of information-sharing than women, but the gender differential did not differ between groups of states. We randomized participants in each set of states to learn the law of their jurisdiction. In states with pay secrecy bans, participants who learned about the law reported significantly greater comfort asking others and intentions to ask others about compensation, compared to those who were not given information about the law.

The law often asks judges to determine whether a violation is clearly established or whether legal language clearly or unambiguously supports a position. It demands that litigants not raise arguments or claims that would be easily dismissed. And for their part legal scholars have relied on the distinction between easy and hard cases as they delineate the concept of law itself. Yet, few have empirically studied assessments of legal difficulty. Here, we present the results of two studies that provide insight into the reliability of such assessments from laypeople and actual judges. For both populations, our key finding was this: assessments of case difficulty are highly predictive of the vote breakdown in a case; that is, the larger the size of a majority coalition, the lower the average difficulty rating registered by the members of that coalition (and, conversely, the smaller the size of a minority coalition, the higher the rating registered by its members). These results suggest that, while assessments of case difficulty are tied to case outcomes, they are a complex signal. Experiencing the feeling that a case is unusually difficult is not necessarily an indication that you are dealing with a 50/50 case, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it may be an indication that your position on the merits would be decisively rejected by the vast majority of others confronting the same question.

Innovation in legal scholarship is a constant, but some innovations are more successful than others. We use descriptive and inferential network analysis to study the dissemination and adoption of empirical studies from three sub-fields—law and economics (L&E), law and society (L&S), and empirical legal studies (ELS)—to one another and to the traditional academic legal community. We find that L&E scholarship and L&S scholarship mostly do not overlap with one another in terms of the topics that are addressed (research frontiers) and the authorities that are cited (knowledge base). Even when topic choice overlaps, L&E scholarship and L&S scholarship cite different authorities, reflecting different fundamental principles and assumptions. In contrast, ELS covers topics that are specific to either JLE or LSR and co-cites landmark works from both sub-fields. By encompassing a diverse array of topics and methodologies, ELS effectively bridges and extends the boundaries of both L&E and L&S, which might have helped facilitate its dissemination to the traditional legal academic community. Our Exponential Random Graph Models further confirm these findings and suggest that ELS simultaneously draws from but also has something useful to offer to scholarship in other areas of the law. In an academic world where fields are dominated by hedgehogs (who know one big thing), ELS scholars are quintessential foxes (who know many things).

We examine the association between right-to-carry (RTC) and stand-your-ground (SYG) laws and justifiable homicides by civilians and police, and discuss public policy implications. In baseline fixed-effects models without interactions, RTC is associated with a 47% increase in civilian justifiable homicides. When an RTC $�\; ��\; �\times ��$ SYG interaction is included, SYG alone is associated with a 51.2% decrease (when RTC = 0), and the RTC main effect is a non-significant but sizable 29.7% increase (when SYG = 0). Their combination is associated with a 36.9% increase relative to states with neither policy, and the marginal effect of adopting RTC in SYG states is large, about 180%. By contrast, police justifiable homicides show no such interaction and are generally unaffected, with a limited exception in baseline large-city models (without interaction terms) where RTC is associated with a decrease. We conduct robustness checks using large-city samples, alternative data (Fatal Encounters), and a placebo–permutation test. Event-study estimates show no significant pre-trends for either law, only a positive estimate two years after RTC adoption at the state level for civilian homicides. Permutation-based inference does not consistently reach conventional significance thresholds. Overall, the results underscore the importance of analyzing police and civilian cases separately, accounting for policy interactions, and exercising caution regarding causal interpretations given data limitations and potential estimator bias.