Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

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.

Studies typically find that lawyers have high job satisfaction and that women are not less satisfied than are men. But racial differences as well as gender differences by race or ethnicity in satisfaction may be masked because most lawyers identify as racially White. To examine whether job satisfaction differs by race and whether gender and race/ethnicity have an intersectional relation to job satisfaction, I use data on nearly 13,000 law graduates drawn from six waves of the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) conducted between 2003 and 2019. The NSCG uniquely provides a large enough sample to examine intersectionality in job satisfaction of law graduates as well as to compare satisfaction of lawyers to those employed in other occupations. Job satisfaction is strikingly low among Black women and Asian women law graduates. Asian women lawyers have satisfaction similar to White men lawyers but substantially lower satisfaction if not employed as a lawyer. Black women have substantially lower satisfaction in either employment situation. The lower satisfaction of Asian and Black women law graduates is not due to differences in personal characteristics, family status or background, job characteristics, or differences in values.

There is a widespread perception that computer crime sentencing is too harsh. But this criticism has occurred in the absence of comprehensive, multi-year data on how computer crimes are actually sentenced and how those sentences compare to other, purportedly similar crimes, such as trespass, burglary, or fraud. This article uses an analysis of real-world sentencing data to examine how the computer crimes are actually sentenced. We combined court filings and U.S. Sentencing Commission data files to build a custom data set of 1095 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) sentences from 2005 through 1998. Our results show that CFAA sentences are sentenced differently from trespass, burglary, or non-CFAA fraud crimes; that sentences in which the defendant exceeded authorized access have declined over the years; and that the “sophisticated means” and “special skills” enhancements have been less routinely applied than has been assumed. These results have policy implications for how CFAA crimes are sentenced.

In a vast majority of disputes, settlement is superior to litigation, which involves uncertainty, legal fees, and opportunity cost. Unnecessary litigation also causes judicial backlog, wastes resources, and increases societal conflict. Major contributors to the lack of settlement are intransigent litigants who harbor overoptimistic predictions of litigation outcomes, even though they are looking at identical facts and applicable law. A study (N = 166) found significant myside bias in the participants' predictions of a judicial award (claimants' advisers expected awards that were 69% higher than defendants' advisers) and in their evaluation of arguments (both sides thought the arguments supporting their side were 30% more convincing than the arguments supporting their counterparty). Debiasing interventions—alerting to the myside bias, considering the perspective of the counterparty and dialectical bootstrapping—reduced the bias but did not eliminate it. Exploratory investigation indicated that a large proportion of advisers exhibited naïve realism and bias blind spot, and that cognitive reflection provided a limited measure of resistance to myside bias.