Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

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.

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.

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 (N = 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.

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.

Previous studies of judgment and decision-making in adjudication have largely focused on juries and judges. This body of work demonstrated that legal training and professional experience sometimes affect attitudes and mitigate the susceptibility to cognitive biases, but often they do not. Relatively few experimental studies examined the decisions of prosecutors and defense lawyers, although they play a major role, especially in legal systems where prosecutors have a broad discretion in charging decisions, courts' discretion regarding sentencing is constrained, and plea bargains abound. This study directly compares laypersons, law students, and legal practitioners—including prosecutors and defense lawyers—in terms of their attitudes about the criminal justice system and their cognitive biases. It was found that the outcome bias and the anti-inference bias influenced all groups similarly, but an irrelevant anchor only impacted the decisions of laypersons and law students, and not those of legal professionals. Prosecutors were significantly more inclined to judge a behavior as negligent and reach factual conclusions supporting a conviction. However, the hypothesis that the susceptibility of prosecutors and defense lawyers to cognitive biases would be affected by their role was not borne out. The article considers possible explanations for the reported findings, and discusses their policy implications.

What is the effect of caseload volume on case outcome disparities based on a litigant's gender or ethnicity? This paper presents three nonexclusive mechanisms to explain possible effects. The first mechanism relates to a litigant's inclination to settle or withdraw claims; the second mechanism concerns the strategic preemption of appeals by judges; and the third mechanism relates to the implicit biases of judges. To document the effect and test the mechanisms, we exploited a natural, near-randomized experiment in the Israeli judicial framework. In 2012, six senior registrars were appointed to two of the country's six magistrate court districts. The choice of districts was not related to judicial performance. In these two districts, the civil caseload per judge was substantially reduced. We find that while this reduced caseload had a significant impact on the judicial process for all litigants, it had a particularly salient and beneficial effect on outcomes for female and Arab plaintiffs. The exogenous reduction in court caseloads was associated with positive effects for female Jewish plaintiffs in terms of the likelihood of winning the claim, recovery amount (from the claim), and cost-shifting outcomes. The change was also associated with positive effects for Arab female plaintiffs in terms of the likelihood of winning the claim and the recovery amount (from the claim). Finally, the reduction in caseloads was associated with a positive effect for Arab male plaintiffs in terms of the fraction of the claim that was recovered. Our findings suggest that when judges are able to invest more time and resources in resolving individual cases, they tend to be less influenced by stereotypes about gender and ethnicity. We discuss the contribution of our findings to the literature on judicial bias and the implications for different policies designed to reduce or manage congested courts.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that female and Black jurors are under-represented on juries in criminal cases, especially so when the prosecution seeks the death penalty. The primary, but not exclusive, way in which this happens is that prosecutors remove them from the jury pool through the exercise of peremptory challenges. The practice remains widespread despite the Supreme Court's decision more than 30 years ago holding that using such challenges in a racially (or gender based) discriminatory manner violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the years since, enforcement by the Supreme Court and state and federal courts has been uneven. However, in several recent cases, in finding that prosecutors struck Black venire persons because of their race, the Supreme Court relied in part on evidence that the prosecution questioned Black and White venire persons differently. The legal term of art for this practice is “disparate questioning.”

Starting around 2006, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) progressively reduced Medicare Fee-for-Service (M-FFS) payments for the principal noninvasive cardiac tests, when performed in a cardiologist office (Office), yet kept payments flat to increasing for the same tests, performed in the hospital-based outpatient (HBO) setting. This produced a growing gap between HBO and Office payments for the same tests, and thus an incentive for hospitals to acquire cardiology practices in order to move cardiac tests to the HBO location and capture the HBO/Office payment differential. We use difference-in-differences analysis, in which we compare national M-FFS trends in cardiac test location to those for a control group of several large, integrated Medicare Advantage (M-Adv) health systems over 2005–2015, which were not affected by these reimbursement changes, and provide evidence that these reimbursement changes led to a large shift in testing from Office to HBO. This shift was concurrent with a sharp rise in hospital-cardiologist integration. The rise in integration and the proportion of testing in HBO varied greatly across states. Independent practice remains viable in very large states, but is endangered in many states, and is all but extinct in a growing number of states.

Despite substantial recent developments in body-worn camera (BWC) research, little is known about the effect of BWC footage on downstream criminal justice actors and agencies. Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative survey responses taken from state prosecutors in Miami-Dade County (FL) in 2019, this study provides one of the most detailed examinations of prosecutors' experiences with BWC footage to date. Using descriptive analyses, ordinary least squares regressions, and structural equation modeling, we examine how the operational challenges associated with BWC footage affect the degree to which prosecutors use the footage and perceive it to be useful. Our results suggest that poor footage quality and delayed video transfer may limit the utility of BWC footage—and in turn—that lower perceptions of utility may reduce the formal usage of BWC footage in court. These findings differ across case-processing stages, however, with transfer delay affecting the utility of BWC video for charging decisions and footage quality affecting the utility of BWC video across multiple case processing stages. Implications and policy recommendations based on these results are discussed.