Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

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.

Occasionally, information about the inner workings of the Supreme Court is leaked to the press by insiders—clerks, or even justices themselves. These leaks reliably stoke controversy among commentators and academics alike who pontificate on the negative effect leaks have on the Court's institutional legitimacy. However, it is not immediately clear from existing theories whether populating the media environment with leaked information will affect public perceptions of the Court, let alone the direction of such effects. In this paper, we use an original survey combined with an original survey experiment to test the extent to which, if any, leaks influence legitimacy ascribed to the Supreme Court. Analysis shows a tightly-estimated null effect of leaks on public views on the Court.

This article aims at disentangling the effect of judges' gender, experience, and caseload in the assignment of restraining orders in IPV cases. Previous literature has independently looked at the effect of gender on judicial decisions and found that it becomes relevant in gender-related cases. However, we find that such effects are better understood in interaction with other contextual factors such as the experience of judges and the amount of work they face, because these determine the levels of uncertainty and information costs surrounding decisions. For our empirical analysis, we use data from on-duty pretrial court decisions on restraining orders in Spain between 2010 and 2018. We find conditional effects of gender depending on experience and workload: more experienced female judges are more likely to grant protection orders than their male counterparts when the amount of caseload is high. These findings are relevant to understand the mechanisms behind judicial inequality under civil law systems, where judges' attributes tend to be unobservable by institutional design.

What does the public think it means to “settle” a civil case? Most legal disputes in the United States end in an agreement to settle, but little is known about what laypeople think about settlement. To fill this gap, we took a direct approach: we asked a nationally representative sample of US adults—more than 1000 of them—basic questions about settlement. We found widespread understanding about the essential nature and frequency of settlement, but persistent, though not universal, misconceptions about the details, including the role of a jury and settlement scope. Because settlement is such a pervasive part of the US legal system, the system's legitimacy turns in part on how the public understands and views civil settlement. The survey reported here provides a foundational study of the understandings and framework—the schemas—that the public bring to settlement.

Hakstian, A.-M., Evett, S. R., Hoffmann, J. S., Marshall, J. M., Boyland, E. A. L., & Williams, J. D. (2022). Racial diversity and group decision-making in a mock jury experiment. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 19(4), 1253–1292. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12335

In Hakstian et al. (2022), there were errors in Figures 2 and 3, published on Page 1271, the y-axis and the corresponding values on each bar have incorrect commas between the hundred thousand place. The corrected Figures 2 and 3 appear below.

We apologize for these errors.

The imposition and lifting of COVID-19 lockdown orders were among the most heatedly debated policies during the pandemic. Credible empirical evaluations of the effects of reopening policies are difficult because policymakers often explicitly linked sustained reductions in COVID-19 cases to the lifting of lockdown orders. This hardwired policy endogeneity creates challenges in isolating the causal effects of lifting of lockdown orders on social mobility and public health. To overcome simultaneity bias, we exploit a natural experiment generated by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it abolished Wisconsin's “Safer at Home” order on separation-of-powers grounds. We capitalize on this sudden, dramatic, and largely unanticipated termination of a statewide lockdown order to estimate its effect—relative to a more gradual scaling back of restrictions—on social mobility and COVID-19 case growth. First, using anonymized smartphone data from SafeGraph and a synthetic control design, we find that termination of COVID-related restrictions had small and short-lived negative impacts on social distancing. Then, using data on case and mortality rates, we find no evidence that the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision impacted COVID-19 growth up to a month following the repeal. These findings suggest that in the absence of carrying new information, sudden lockdown repeals may generate smaller behavioral responses than policymakers anticipate.

In New Mexico and many other jurisdictions, judges may detain defendants pretrial if the prosecutor proves, through clear and convincing evidence, that releasing them would pose a danger to the public. However, some policymakers argue that certain classes of defendants should have a “rebuttable presumption” of dangerousness, shifting the burden of proof to the defense. Using data on over 15,000 felony defendants who were released pretrial in a 4-year period in New Mexico, we measure how many of them would have been detained by various presumptions, and what fraction of these defendants in fact posed a danger in the sense that they were charged with a new crime during pretrial supervision. We consider presumptions based on the current charge, past convictions, past failures to appear, past violations of conditions of release, and combinations of these drawn from recent legislative proposals. We find that for all these criteria, at most 8% of the defendants they identify are charged pretrial with a new violent crime (felony or misdemeanor), and at most 5% are charged with a new violent felony. The false-positive rate, that is, the fraction of defendants these policies would detain who are not charged with any new crime pretrial, ranges from 71% to 90%. The broadest legislative proposals, such as detaining all defendants charged with a violent felony, are little more accurate than detaining a random sample of defendants released under the current system, and would jail 20 or more people to prevent a single violent felony. We also consider detention recommendations based on risk scores from the Arnold Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Among released defendants with the highest risk score and the “violence flag,” 7% are charged with a new violent felony and 71% are false positives. We conclude that these criteria for rebuttable presumptions do not accurately target dangerous defendants: they cast wide nets and recommend detention for many pretrial defendants who do not pose a danger to the public.