Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

This paper examines the impact of police funding on the fraction of homicides that are cleared by arrest. Using data covering homicides in approximately 50 of the largest US cities from 2007 to 2017, I find no evidence that greater police funding resulted in higher homicide clearance rates. This finding is robust to linear regression and instrumental variable approaches, different ways to measure police budgets, and across victims of different races and in different types of neighborhoods. In summary, the way large city police departments have historically spent their funds, more funding has not helped catch more murderers.

This study examines how a rapid change in social perceptions of a national-origin group triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic influenced immigration judges' decision-making in US removal proceedings. Using originally compiled court data on removal proceedings decided between 2019 and 2020, we applied a difference-in-differences framework to produce three key findings. First, consistent with theory of event stigma, Chinese respondents experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Second, consistent with theory of associative stigma, East and Southeast (E/SE) Asian respondents also experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Third, the removal rate declined for both Chinese and E/SE respondents during the later pandemic period, but this decline was more gradual and lagged for E/SE Asian than for Chinese respondents. Finally, increases in the number of cases involving Chinese respondents increased the removal rate for E/SE Asian respondents during the early months of the pandemic. The last two findings suggest that associative or indirect stigmatization may be harder to combat than direct stigmatization owing to the implicit nature of bias underlying associative stigma. This study highlights the socially constructed nature of national origin groups, and the importance of both direct and indirect stigmatization in the production of social inequality.

This paper studies whether doctors prescribe antibiotics to protect themselves against potential malpractice claims. Using data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey on a representative sample of doctor visits from 1993 to 2011, I find that doctors are significantly less likely to prescribe antibiotics following tort reforms that reduce malpractice pressure. The changing prescribing patterns appear to have no adverse effects on patient health outcomes over the same time period. Almost 100 million hospital records from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample reveal little to no effects of tort reforms on hospital stays involving conditions that can potentially be avoided through the timely use of antibiotics. Taken together, these findings suggest that malpractice pressure induces doctors to prescribe antibiotics that are medically unnecessary, thereby contributing to the rise in antibiotic resistance.

We conduct comprehensive analyses on whether and how the judicial foreclosure procedure helps subprime mortgage borrowers to reinstate their delinquent loans outside foreclosure liquidation. Even though the transition rates of various exit types are all higher in non-judicial states, we argue such higher rates can be mechanically driven by the faster shrinking pool of delinquent mortgages in non-judicial states over time. Based on the cumulative proportions of various exit types during a period of up to 5 years post the mortgage first become 90 days past due, we find that judicial states offer more opportunities for delinquent borrowers to reinstate their loans outside foreclosure liquidation, especially during a housing market downturn. Cures, modifications, and paid-offs were all important alternative ways to resolve serious delinquencies during 2007–2008. After modifications became widely available in 2009, loan modifications became the most important alternative for subprime borrowers to reinstate their delinquent mortgages outside foreclosure liquidation. The lion's share of the judicial foreclosure benefit shows up after the start of the foreclosure process.

This article uncovers the role of framing in the determination of negligence. Negligence disputes fall into two categories: cases in which injurers inflicted harm while seeking to avoid a loss to themselves (loss frame) and those in which they were seeking to obtain a personal gain (gain frame). We develop a theoretical framework whereby the frame of the injurer's behavior shapes negligence determinations in two ways. First, people are less likely to find an injurer negligent in a loss than in a gain frame. This is because, due to loss aversion, they find behavior more reasonable if done to avoid a loss than to obtain a gain. Second, people accord greater weight to the efficiency of the injurer's behavior in a loss frame than in a gain frame. This is because a comparison between the victim's harm and the injurer's benefit is more salient when both parties face a loss (loss frame). A series of experiments supported both hypotheses as well as the underlying mechanism. We discuss the implications of our findings and suggest that they may relate to the seemingly inconsistent case law on the role of efficiency considerations in negligence cases.

This paper studies a probation program in Cologne, Germany. The program, which has a clear rehabilitative focus, offers intensified personal support to serious juvenile offenders over the first 6 months of their probation period. To evaluate the program's impact on recidivism, we draw on two research designs. Firstly, a small-scale randomized trial assigns offenders to probation with regular or intensified support. Secondly, a regression discontinuity design exploits a cutoff that defines program eligibility. The results suggest that the program reduces recidivism. The effect seems persistent over at least 3 years. Our evidence further indicates that the drop in recidivism is strongest among less severe offenders.

This paper argues that estimating causal effects on US Appellate Court panels can be advanced by analyzing the data as a series of natural experiments, fully exploiting the as-if random assignment of judges to cases. As a template, this paper reanalyzes Boyd et al.'s data on sex-discrimination cases. The question is the impact on the votes by male judges from having a female judge on their panel. Leverage from as-if random assignment can be exploited only by restricting comparisons of treatments cases (in the example, female co-panelist) exclusively to control cases (all-male panels) from the same period and time period from which the treatment cases are drawn. With as-if random assignment reducing the possibility of a biased estimate, the results confirms a gender panel effect similar in size to the claim by Boyd et al. Restricting comparisons to within the same circuit and time period further advances understanding of the causal mechanism. When male or female judges side with female plaintiffs, the females are more persuasive at swaying the votes of their male co-panelists' votes.

In this article I present the first two of a new series of open and high-quality international legal data sets: comprehensive, fully reproducible, human- and machine-readable open access collections covering one hundred years of case law of the primary judicial organs of the United Nations and the League of Nations: the Corpus of Decisions: International Court of Justice (CD-ICJ) and the Corpus of Decisions: Permanent Court of International Justice (CD-PCIJ). Each corpus is designed to capture in its entirety the published case law of its eponymous Court, including majority opinions (judgments, advisory opinions and orders), but also the minority opinions annexed to each decision (declarations, separate opinions and dissenting opinions). The corpora are enriched with useful metadata to enhance text-as-data research and enable stand-alone metadata analyses. While each corpus can stand on its own, the twin corpora are designed to be perfectly interoperable for the purposes of analyses that wish to treat the ICJ and PCIJ as a continuous entity. The most recent versions of the corpora will always be available open access at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3826444 (CD-ICJ) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3840479 (CD-PCIJ).

Copyright termination laws in the United States allow creators to end their copyright assignments and licences after various time periods and regain their rights. These laws are designed to protect authors and their heirs by giving them a second opportunity to profit from their works, where they might have assigned them initially for relatively little. Similar laws are in force and being recommended for implementation around the world. However, there is little data on how these laws are being used. Such data is vital because it provides insights into the pros and cons of different systems. We fill this gap by providing the first large-scale study of copyright termination notice records from the U.S. Copyright Office. Utilising data scraping and manipulation techniques in the Python programming language, we have created two brand new datasets for scholars, copyright experts, creators, publishers, and other industry stakeholders to examine. In our accompanying paper, we document some preliminary trends from the data and how it might be used for further analysis.