Reporting the Law
Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel
Elliott Ash & Michael Poyker
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Local exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variables analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to Fox News Channel. These treatment data on news viewership are taken to outcomes data on almost 7 million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the years 2005-2017. Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, and the effect is stronger for black defendants and for drug-related crimes. We can rule out changes in the behavior of police, prosecutors, or potential offenders as significant drivers. Consistent with changes in voter attitudes as the key mechanism, the effect on sentencing harshness is observed for elected (but not appointed) judges. Fox News viewership also increases self-reported beliefs about the importance of drug crime as a social problem.
Judicial Specialization and Deference in Asylum Cases on the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Maureen Stobb & Joshua Kennedy
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many look to the federal courts as an avenue of control of the growing administrative state. Some advocate the creation of specialized federal courts of appeals in areas such as immigration and social security. Yet, little is known about whether repeat exposure to specific types of cases enables federal judges to overcome doctrines of deference and whether such an effect would be policy-neutral. Gathering a sample of over 4000 cases decided by the U.S. Courts of Appeals between 2002 and 2017, we demonstrate that exposure to asylum cases over time emboldens federal judges to challenge administrative asylum decisions, asserting their personal policy preferences. The effect is particularly strong when the legal issue should prompt deference based on bureaucratic expertise. These findings not only address important questions raised by bureaucracy and court scholars but also inform a salient public debate concerning the proper treatment of those seeking refuge within our borders.
Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights
Chelsey Clark et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research focused on popular US Supreme Court rulings expanding rights; however, less is known about rulings running against prevailing public opinion and restricting rights. We examine the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, which overturned Roe v. Wade’s (1973) constitutional protection of abortion rights. A three-wave survey panel (5,489 interviews) conducted before the leak of the drafted Dobbs opinion, after the leak, and after the official opinion release, and cross-sectional data from these three time points (10,107 interviews) show that the ruling directly influenced views about the constitutional legality of abortion and fetal viability. However, personal opinions were not directly influenced and perceived social norms shifted away from the ruling, meaning that individuals perceived greater public support for abortion. We argue that extensive coverage of opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade supported this shift. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization also caused large changes, polarized by party identification, in opinions about the Supreme Court.
Systemic Failure To Appear in Court
Lindsay Graef et al.
University of Pennsylvania Law Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This Article aims to reorient the conversation around "failure-to-appear" (FTA) in criminal court. Recent policy and scholarship have addressed FTA mostly as a problem of criminal defendants, in connection with questions about how bail systems should operate. But ten years of data from Philadelphia reveal a striking fact: It is not defendants who most frequently fail to appear but rather the other parties necessary for a criminal proceeding -- witnesses and lawyers. Between 2010 and 2020, an essential witness or lawyer failed to appear for at least one hearing in 53% of all cases, compared to a 19% FTA rate for defendants. Police officers, victims, other witnesses, and private attorneys each failed to appear at rates substantially higher than defendants. In short: FTA is a systemic phenomenon. The systemic nature of FTA calls into question the extreme asymmetry between the treatment of defendant and non-defendant FTA. Bail reform has generated intense debates about when cash bail, detention, and other pretrial interventions are warranted to ensure defendants’ appearance. Given that witnesses and lawyers also have a legal duty to appear, the systemic nature of FTA requires more comprehensive thinking about how best to get people to court and when restrictions on liberty are appropriate. Systemic FTA also has systemic consequences, because when essential witnesses don’t show, cases are dropped. FTA thus serves a regulatory function, providing a check on the nature and volume of criminal adjudications. Sometimes this function seems beneficial, as when witness FTA carries information about the strength or worth of the case. But sometimes it seems like a problem. The sheer volume of police officer FTA creates an impression of arbitrariness, dysfunction, and disrespect. Other aspects of this regulatory dynamic are more ambiguous. For instance, victim FTA rates are so persistently high that many appear to be effectively "opting out" of the criminal proceeding. This Article aims to draw attention to systemic FTA as an important feature of contemporary U.S. criminal legal systems, identify the core questions that it raises, and lay a path for future research.
Legal Assistance for Evictions: Impacts, Mechanisms, and Demand
Aviv Caspi & Charlie Rafkin
MIT Working Paper, November 2023
Abstract:
We randomize provision of attorneys to tenants facing eviction in Memphis, Tennessee (N = 265 treatment, 753 control), who otherwise seldom have legal representation. Despite landlord-friendly eviction law, providing an attorney reduces tenant eviction judgment rates within 90 days by 27 percentage points (50%). However, attorneys’ effects persist only when they can connect tenants to other services. Once a concurrent emergency rental assistance program expires, effects on judgments at 90 days shrink by about 70% and are indistinguishable from zero. Attorneys have little effect on informal outcomes and bargaining. Incentivized surveys suggest tenants’ willingness to pay for an attorney is double attorneys’ price, and seven times attorneys’ implied impacts on tenants’ incomes via stopping evictions. This high willingness to pay does not appear to result from elicitation errors, misperceptions, or binding budget constraints. We contrast lawyers’ Marginal Value of Public Funds from using elicited willingness to pay (MVPF = 2.7 without rental assistance, ignoring impacts on landlords or general equilibrium) versus a standard calibrated approach (MVPF = 0.4).
Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?
Christian Dippel & Michael Poyker
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2023, Pages 511–534
Abstract:
Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether the presence of private prisons impacts state judges’ sentencing decisions. We employ two identification strategies: a difference-in-differences strategy that compares only court pairs that straddle state borders and an event study using the full data. We find that the opening of a private prison has a small but statistically significant and robust effect on sentence length, while the opening of a public prison does not. The effect is entirely driven by changes in sentencing in the first 2 months after prison openings. The combined evidence appears inconsistent with the hypothesis that private prisons may directly influence judges; instead, a simple salience explanation may be the most plausible.
I Can’t See You; Can You Hear Me? Gender Norms and Context During In-Person and Teleconference U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments
Shane Gleason
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Female attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.
The effect of a presumption of guilt on police guilt judgments
Yueran Yang et al.
Psychology, Crime & Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
Police conduct pre-interrogation interviews with suspects whom they presume might be guilty. This research tested whether a presumption of guilt causes police to misclassify innocent suspects as guilty during pre-interrogation interviews by virtue of biasing their interpretation of suspects’ emotional states. In two experiments, college students (n = 33) and police officers (n = 33) each watched eight videos in which an experimenter interviewed a student who was either factually guilty or factually innocent of having cheated on a problem-solving task. After watching each video, participants reported their judgments of the interviewed student’s emotional state and guilt-status. The results indicated that both college students and police officers reported higher guilt judgments when they presumed the interviewed students to be guilty versus innocent. Additionally, participants’ perceptions of the interviewed students’ emotional states mediated this effect. Factual guilt-status did not influence judgments rendered by either college students or police officers. The results suggest that police may be susceptible to misclassifying innocent suspects as guilty when they hold a presumption of guilt at the outset of a pre-interrogation interview.
Jail Utilization and Court Sentencing: Does Jail Overcrowding Influence State Court Sentencing Decisions?
Clare Strange et al.
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing upon organizational perspectives and focal concerns theory, this article tests the impacts of jail utilization (i.e. the ratio of jail population: rated capacity) on sentencing practices. Using 18 years of felony sentencing data from Florida and county characteristics, ordinary least squares regression models are estimated to determine whether jail utilization impacts sentencing trends between counties. Latent growth curves assess jail utilization effects within counties over time. Jail utilization is significantly associated with sentencing and this effect is robust across and within counties over time. Across counties the effect is largely non-linear; community-based sanctions are more common in counties that have reached a jail utilization threshold. Jail utilization effects are robust across general and discretionary cases but vary according to local crime rates. The findings suggest that extralegal considerations influence sentencing decisions; i.e. when jail utilization decreases, courts will impose more jail sentences simply because space is available.
Politicization of the Supreme Court and Firm Value: Evidence from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death
Tor-Erik Bakke et al.
University of Illinois Working Paper, October 2023
Abstract:
We exploit the sudden passing of justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) -- an event that signaled a more conservative Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) -- to examine the impact of a change in the partisan composition of the SCOTUS on firm value. Consistent with a more conservative SCOTUS, we find that Republican-leaning firms exhibit more positive abnormal announcement returns around RBG's passing. This result is driven by industry-level political preferences. Republican-leaning firms located in Republican-controlled states exhibit more positive returns. Firms facing more political risk exhibit lower announcement returns, consistent with an increase in economic policy uncertainty following RBG’s passing.
Measuring law's normative force
Kevin Cope
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2023, Pages 1005-1044
Abstract:
An important question in legal theory and policy is when people are willing to put aside their policy preferences to uphold higher-order legal values. That is, when does constitutional or international law, for instance, have “normative force”? Around two-dozen experimental studies have attempted to measure this question empirically, but their designs contain an inherent limitation. While they are interested in gauging the effect of internalizing a norm, they measure only the effect of exposure to that norm. This is significant because subjects in the treatment group whose priors are strongly contrary to the treatment message on the legality of a policy may effectively be “treatment resistant”: it is difficult to successfully treat them because their prior beliefs on the issue are entrenched; as a result, they simply do not believe the treatment message. This treatment failure attenuates any effects, and where a significant portion of the treatment and/or control group is not successfully treated, the results will be biased toward small, null, or even backfire findings. This article first formally models the mechanism underlying experiments on law's normative force. I then demonstrate a methodological solution to the problem of treatment resistance. By using the experimental treatment as an instrumental variable and employing a post-treatment treatment-uptake test, the researcher can estimate the causal effect of the real explanatory variable of interest: sincerely holding a belief about a policy's higher-order lawfulness. Using new data from a 2022 survey experiment conducted on US residents, I illustrate this method for three constitutional or international law issues. The theoretical and empirical results together suggest that backfire effects documented by some studies do not reflect a tepid or negative response against the legal source per se, but rather reflect treatment resistance. These findings suggest that we should re-evaluate the existing body of experimental studies on law's normative force, and they should prompt researchers to reconsider how we conduct future research in this domain.