Open to Interpretation
Do progressive prosecutors increase crime? A quasi-experimental analysis of crime rates in the 100 largest counties, 2000–2020
Nick Petersen, Ojmarrh Mitchell & Shi Yan
Criminology & Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a rise in so-called “progressive prosecutors” focused on criminal justice reforms. Although there has been considerable debate about the relationship between progressive prosecution policies and crime rates, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the topic. Building on the limited extant research, we examined whether the inauguration of progressive prosecutors in the nation's 100 most populous counties impacted crime rates during a 21-year period (2000 to 2020). After developing an original database of progressive prosecutors in the 100 largest counties, we used heterogeneous difference-in-differences regressions to examine the influence of progressive prosecutors on crime rates. Results show that the inauguration of progressive prosecutors led to statistically higher index property (∼7%) and total crime rates (driven by rising property crimes), and these effects were strongest since 2013 -- a period with an increasing number of progressive prosecutors. However, violent crime rates generally were not higher after a progressive prosecutor assumed control.
So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time
Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica & Edward Gibson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, May 2024, Pages 1153-1164
Abstract:
Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts -- collectively referred to as the “plain-language movement” -- have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period. We also compared the entirety of the U.S. Code (the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force) with a large sample of recently published texts from six baseline genres of English. We found that laws remain laden with features associated with psycholinguistic complexity -- including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon, capitalization, and sentence length -- relative to the baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined since the initial onset of the plain-language efforts. These findings suggest top-down efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, and call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal doctrines whose validity rests on the notion of laws being easily interpretable by laypeople.
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton & Maya Sen
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study how the ideological positions of petitioners, respondents, and appeals panels influence the Supreme Court’s decision to hear cases. We theorize that the Court is more likely to grant cert petitions when there is (1) ideological distance between the parties and (2) the appeals panel is aligned with the winning side. In these cases, the petitioning party is an “Odd Party Out,” which conveys information about the possibility of lower court bias. We test the theory using a new dataset of almost 18,000 cert petitions that includes advocate and judge ideology. We find that cert is more likely when the petitioner -- regardless of ideology -- is the Odd Party Out. This effect is driven by civil cases, but is similar for low- and high-salience cases. We argue that our results are consistent with justices being more willing to exercise oversight when a possibility of ideological bias in lower courts exists.
An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology
Kevin Cope
University of Virginia Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
This Article develops the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS) initiative, the first dynamic method for systematically measuring the ideologies and other traits of nearly the entire Article III judiciary. The measure derives from computational text analysis of over 20,000 written evaluations by a representative sample of tens of thousands of jurists as part of an ongoing, systematic survey initiative began in 1985. The resulting data constitute not only the first such comprehensive federal-court measure that is dynamic, but also the only such measure that is based on judging, and the only such measure that is potentially multi-dimensional. The results of empirical validity tests reflect these advantages. Validation on a set of several-thousand appellate decisions indicates that the ideology estimates predict outcomes more accurately than the existing appellate measures, such as the Judicial Common Space. In addition to informing theoretical debates about the nature of judicial ideology and decision-making, the JuDJIS initiative might lead courts scholars to revisit some of the lower-court research findings of the last two decades, which are generally based on static models. Perhaps most importantly, this method could foster breakthroughs in courts research that, until now, were impossible due to data limitations.
The Supreme Court’s Partisan Composition Affects How Americans Evaluate Nominees
Victor Wu & Yusaku Horiuchi
Stanford Working Paper, March 2024
Abstract:
While existing studies assume that the public evaluates Supreme Court nominees as individuals in a vacuum, we argue that Americans consider nominees in the broader context of the Court. Using a conjoint experiment with 9,895 participants, we show that the salience of nominee partisanship varies depending on the Court’s partisan composition. As expected, Democrats and Republicans care less about a nominee’s partisanship when their party already enjoys a 6-2 majority. Surprisingly, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is evenly split as when the other party enjoys a 6-2 majority -- even though the ninth Justice would only swing the balance of the Court in the former scenario. We provide two interpretations for this counterintuitive finding, one based on utility maximization and one based on political psychology. Our findings contribute to the literature on politicization of the Court in particular and the literature on partisan polarization more generally.
Reform we can agree on: Public opinion on prosecutorial liability
Rachel Leigh Greenspan, Ross Miller & Paul Heaton
Journal of Experimental Criminology, March 2024, Pages 255–267
Objectives: The current study explores public opinion about civil liability for official misconduct by prosecutors by surveying a nationally representative sample of US adults (N = 2000).
Method: Participants read a vignette describing a wrongful conviction and were randomly assigned to read a version where the prosecutor knew about exonerating DNA evidence before trial and did not disclose it or where the prosecutor was unaware of the exonerating evidence before trial. They then decided whether the prosecutor should be liable for money damages and explained their reasoning.
Results: Results showed broad support for civil liability in both conditions. Support was consistent across demographic categories including race, age, and political affiliation. Responses also indicated support for liability for other government actors (e.g., police, prosecutors’ offices).
Does the 1L curriculum make a difference?
David Hyman, Jing Liu & Joshua Teitelbaum
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Georgetown Law's Curriculum B (also known as Section 3) offers a unique opportunity to study an alternative 1L curriculum. The standard 1L curriculum has been around for decades and is still offered at the vast majority of US law schools. Leaders in the legal academy often talk about experimenting with the 1L curriculum, but hardly anyone does it. Georgetown Law has. We study whether Georgetown's Curriculum B yields measurable differences in student outcomes. Our empirical design leverages the fact that enrollment in Curriculum B is done by lottery when it is oversubscribed -- meaning our study is effectively a randomized controlled trial. We measure treatment effects of Curriculum B by comparing outcomes of students who received the treatment (Curriculum B) with outcomes of students who received the placebo (Curriculum A) but wanted the treatment. Because students in both the treatment and control groups elected to enroll in Curriculum B, our empirical design overcomes the issue of selection bias. We find that taking Curriculum B decreases students' performance in two business law electives (Corporations and Securities Regulation) and reduces the rate at which they graduate with Latin honors. In addition, we find that it increases students' propensity to take certain public law electives and decreases their propensity to take certain business law electives. We further find that taking Curriculum B decreases students' likelihood of working in the private sector (law firm or business/industry), increases their likelihood of working in the public sector (government or public interest) or doing a judicial clerkship, and reduces their average annual salary. At the same, however, we find no statistically significant effects on other outcomes, including students' cumulative grade point average, their chances of passing the bar exam or being employed 10 months after graduation, or their rate or amount of alumni giving.
Does Racial Bias Explain the Black-White Sentencing Gap across U.S. Courts?
Michael Light & Karl Vachuska
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely speculated that prejudicial attitudes and implicit biases are fundamental to understanding racial disparities in criminal punishment. Yet surprisingly little research links measures of racial bias to data on criminal court decision-making. This article fills this gap by combining multiple aggregate measures of implicit and explicit racial bias with data from U.S. federal courts to examine whether racial disparities in sentencing are associated with prejudicial attitudes within the surrounding court context. We find no evidence that racial biases, whether implicit or explicit, significantly influence racial sentencing disparities across U.S. district courts. Nor do we find evidence that racial biases yield greater sentencing disparities in supplementary analyses using county-level court data. We do, however, find suggestive evidence that the prosecutorial application of mandatory minimums is sensitive to the level of racial bias within a court’s jurisdiction. Specifically, we find that Black defendants are disproportionately charged in districts with greater explicit racial animus.
The Rulemakers: An Empirical Analysis of Chief Justice Appointments to the Judicial Conference Rules Committees
Dawn Chutkow & Michael Heise
Cornell University Working Paper, December 2023
Abstract:
The Chief Justice of the United States occupies a singular role as head of a sizable administrative structure which guides and oversees the federal judiciary. This executive role includes appointment power over the committees of the Judicial Conference, the federal courts’ primary policymaking arm. The Judicial Conference Rules Committees study the federal courts’ procedural rules and set the baseline for recommended rule amendments to Congress. As procedural rules regulate access to courts as well as affect the parameters of litigation in ways that may benefit one category of litigants over another, questions arise about the chief justice’s preferences when making committee appointments and the rulemakers’ resultant neutrality and experiential diversity. This Article updates prior research and analyzes the chief justice’s appointments to the six Judicial Conference Rules Committees from 1992 to 2022. The Article finds no significant partisan preference in appointments, except for committee chairs where the likelihood of chairmanship increases for Republican presidential appointees. Judges with a public defender background are less likely to be appointed. Gender does not appear to be a significant factor in committee appointment, but minorities are statistically underrepresented in committee service. The lack of partisan effects in general committee service is a change from prior years and prior studies, however descriptive statistics regarding the gender, race, and background effects suggest that committee appointments warrant continued attention.
Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jonathan Choi, Amy Monahan & Daniel Schwarcz
Minnesota Law Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly -- where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. In follow up surveys, participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and correctly predicted the tasks for which GPT-4 were most helpful. These results have important descriptive and normative implications for the future of lawyering. Descriptively, they suggest that AI assistance can significantly improve productivity and satisfaction, and that they can be selectively employed by lawyers in areas where they are most useful. Because these tools have an equalizing effect on performance, they may also promote equality in a famously unequal profession. Normatively, our findings suggest that law schools, lawyers, judges, and clients should affirmatively embrace AI tools and plan for a future in which they will become widespread.
The prosecutor gender gap in Texas death penalty cases
David Niven & Mallory Rock
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Methods: Across more than 14,000 capital cases prosecuted in Texas between 1978 and 2018, we use bivariate data and logistic regression to explore the relationship between prosecutor gender and the sentences sought and imposed in capital cases. We control for various details of the crime, victim and defendant demographics, and political variables.
Results: Bivariate data reveal that women district attorneys pursued fewer death sentences and ultimately produced fewer death sentences than men. A logistic regression estimates capital case defendants were over 30 percent more likely to be sentenced to death if they faced a male district attorney than a female district attorney.