Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article proposes a new classification of legal remedies that cuts across existing classifications. It argues that all remedies involving the transfer of resources are positioned along a continuum from close to remote, which determines their “distance factor.” The basic distinction is between remedies provided directly by the injurer to the injured and remedies that are provided through third parties. The article presents the results of two original, preregistered experiments designed to examine the effect of the distance factor on perceptions of, and preferences for, various remedies from the perspectives of both the injured and injurers. The experiments reveal that even when the remedy is monetary, both injured and injurers prefer the remedy with the smaller distance factor. Specifically, both parties believe that direct compensation leads to better outcomes than payment via a third party with regard to rectifying the harm done, granting satisfaction to the injured, treating the injured and injurer with respect, improving the bilateral relations, and increasing the injurer's sense of responsibility for the harm. These findings are relevant to the various goals that the law wishes to promote, such as corrective justice, economic efficiency, or distributive justice. They vindicate the importance of private law, offer a more attractive justification for it than the one offered by Civil Recourse Theory, and support pluralism in remedial modes.

Reason-giving is a hallmark of judicial decision-making. However, many judicial decisions are not accompanied by detailed reasons—or any reasons at all. Judicial reason-giving serves various goals, including constraining judges' discretion. The very engagement in writing and the enhanced accountability that comes with the provision of written reasons are expected to foster more deliberative thinking and stricter adherence to legal norms. Several prior studies have investigated the influence of judicial reason-giving on judges' vulnerability to cognitive and other biases. But none have examined the effect of reason-giving on the inclination to deviate from formal legal rules in cases where there is a notable tension between the legal rules and the equities of the case in question (“hard cases”). This article reports on four novel, pre-registered experiments designed to test this important issue. The experiments also explored (1) the extent to which a precedent where the court deviated from the formal rule in a hard case affects the ruling in a subsequent “easy case” (one that lacks such tension)—and how reason-giving influences this effect, and (2) the extent to which a precedent where the court followed the formal rule in an easy case affects the ruling in a subsequent hard case—and how reason-giving influences this effect. The article discusses the policy implications of the findings and avenues for future research.