Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

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.

Under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), legislators deploy expedited procedures to repeal agency regulations. For decades, the conventional wisdom—drawn from a handful of cases in which rules were repealed—has been that the CRA is primarily used by Republicans to nullify regulations issued at the close of Democratic presidential administrations. In this article, we demonstrate that the conventional wisdom provides an incomplete account of the use of the CRA. The centerpiece of our approach is an original data set of all resolutions disapproving of agency regulations introduced over a 26-year period. The analysis of this data set demonstrates that Democrats make regular use of the CRA and that resolutions are consistently pursued outside of presidential transitions. Given these patterns, we argue (contrary to existing accounts) that the CRA is not inherently deregulatory and routinely has utility as an instrument of position taking for legislators of both political parties.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most schools across the United States abruptly transitioned to remote, virtual learning in the spring of 2020. For the 2020–2021 school year, however, public school districts' instructional mode decisions (in-person, hybrid, and remote) varied across districts and throughout the school year. This study focuses on factors that informed school districts' instructional mode decisions and how student access to in-person instruction, in turn, distributed across districts and students (and their families). Levering the leading nationwide data set gathered by the COVID-19 School Data Hub (“CSDH”), supplemented by district per-pupil spending information as well as various state-level data, this study analyzes the percentage of in-person instruction for the 2020–2021 school year offered by 11,063 regular public school districts from 42 states. Core findings underscore that school districts with Republican governors and in rural areas provided comparably more in-person schooling. Conversely, school districts with higher enrollments and higher percentages of underrepresented minority students provided less. Furthermore, COVID-19-related death rates and the likelihood of in-person schooling were positively related. These findings, while mixed, nonetheless raise troubling equal educational opportunity doctrine questions.

Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in government and public interest (GPI) law, where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multiwave, panel survey of law students, we take advantage of a unique tuition remission intervention that occurred at the founding of University of California Irvine (UCI) Law, resulting in a natural, quasi-experiment. Using ordinary least squares regression and an instrumental variables approach, we ask whether law student debt influences the likelihood that students will (1) launch their careers in the GPI and (2) aspire to the GPI sector 5 years after graduation. We find little to no evidence that student debt is a barrier to a graduate's decision to take a position in the GPI sector at career launch or that debt is a factor in a graduate's career aspirations at UCI law school during the study period. These counterintuitive findings provoke new questions about our understanding of debt in the context of legal education and the types of interventions that might facilitate greater entry into the public sector.

After arrest, criminal defendants are often detained before trial to mitigate potential risks to public safety. There is widespread concern, however, that detention decisions are biased against racial minorities. When assessing potential racial discrimination in pretrial detention, past studies have typically worked to quantify the extent to which the ultimate judicial decision is conditioned on the defendant's race. Although often useful, this approach suffers from three important limitations. First, it ignores the multi-stage nature of the pretrial process, in which decisions and recommendations are made over multiple court appearances that influence the final judgment. Second, it does not consider the multiple actors involved, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, each of whom have different responsibilities and incentives. Finally, a narrow focus on disparate treatment fails to consider potential disparate impact arising from facially neutral policies and practices. Addressing these limitations, here we present a framework for quantifying disparate impact in multi-stage, multi-actor settings, illustrating our approach using 10 years of data on pretrial decisions from a federal district court. We find that Hispanic defendants are released at lower rates than white defendants of similar safety and nonappearance risk. We trace these disparities to decisions of assistant US attorneys at the initial hearings, decisions driven in part by a statutory mandate that lowers the procedural bar for moving for detention of defendants in certain types of cases. We also find that the Pretrial Services Agency recommends detention of Black defendants at higher rates than white defendants of similar risk, though we do not find evidence that these recommendations translate to disparities in actual release rates. Finally, we find that traditional disparate treatment analyses yield more modest evidence of discrimination in pretrial detention outcomes, highlighting the value of our more expansive analysis for identifying, and ultimately remediating, unjust disparities in the pretrial process. We conclude with a discussion of how risk-based threshold release policies could help to mitigate observed disparities, and the estimated impact of various policies on violation rates in the partner jurisdiction.

We examine the effect of managerial litigation risk on corporate investment efficiency. Exploiting the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States and employing a stacked regression approach, we find that the exogenous reduction in litigation risk induced by UD laws leads to lower investment efficiency. Our results are robust to the use of alternative partitioning variables and variations in sample composition. We also find that the decrease in investment sensitivity and excessive risk-taking are channels through which the reduced litigation rights lead to less efficient investments. Our results support the notion that weakened shareholder litigation rights lead to more severe agency conflicts and thus less efficient investment decisions.

This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that single-member panels are as efficient as three-member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.