An analysis of the The Bar Passage Study (BPS) reveals that minorities are both less likely to graduate from law school and less likely to pass the bar compared to whites even after adjustments are made for group differences in academic credentials. To account for these adjusted racial gaps in performance, some researchers put forward the “mismatch hypothesis,” which proposes that students learn less when placed in learning environments where their academic skills are much lower than the typical student. This article presents new results from the BPS that account for both measurement-error bias and selection-on-unobservables bias that makes it more difficult to find a mismatch effect if in fact one exists. I find much more evidence for mismatch effects than previous research and report magnitudes from mismatch effects more than sufficient to explain racial gaps in performance.

In the wake of Granholm v. Heald, numerous states passed new laws to regulate interstate direct shipment of alcohol that would seem to contradict the spirit, if not the explicit content, of the Commerce Clause. We build on existing scholarship analyzing the empirical impacts of direct shipment barriers to identify how these new laws are likely to influence local market conditions. Drawing on new data that measure posted winery prices and aggregate production levels in 2002 and 2004, we demonstrate how many of these new laws would be expected to effectively diminish, if not altogether remove, the benefits that would normally accrue to consumers from legalized interstate direct shipment of wine. Although empirical analysis of price effects currently plays a very limited role in dormant Commerce Clause cases, our analysis suggests how price data can be used to ascertain whether a state restriction constitutes discrimination against out-of-state economic interests.

Jury members are confronted with highly complex, ill-defined problems. Coherence-based reasoning (Pennington & Hastie 1992; Simon 2004), which partially relies on intuitive-automatic processing, empowers them to nonetheless make meaningful decisions. These processes, however, have a downside. We tested possible negative effects in a set of studies. Specifically, we investigated whether stricter standards of proof are suppressed by stronger coherence shifts and whether the probative value of the evidence is properly taken into account. We found that U.S. model jury instructions for preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt influence conviction rates in the intended direction and are not undermined by coherence shifts, although probabilistic estimations of these standards are inappropriate. However, even massive changes in explicitly stated probabilities, while holding the overall constellation of facts constant, did not influence conviction rates or the estimated probability of conviction. We argue that reforms in legal procedure should focus on measures to reduce the negative side effects of coherence-based reasoning in general but, more specifically, to make probabilistic information better evaluable for decisionmakers in law.

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court data set of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to lay the foundation for a more precise and useful taxonomy of federal litigation than has been previously available, one that, after the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009), has also arguably never been more relevant than it is today.

This article examines whether strong laws are effective when regulatory institutions are weak. This has become especially relevant due to criticisms of financial market regulation in the United States. I test the impact of imposing strong laws on a weak regulatory environment by using China's principled reforms to market manipulation law as a natural experiment. The results from difference-in-difference tests suggest that China's principled law reforms did not improve the market's information environment, as proxied by the level of informed trade and information asymmetry. This implies that principled law reform is ineffective if the regulatory environment is weak.

An enduring piece of legal wisdom contends that the value of court opinions depreciates as they age and a variety of factors lead some cases to depreciate faster than others. We measure depreciation as the change in the frequency with which Supreme Court cases are cited as a function of their age. We then examine whether the rate of depreciation varies systematically based on ideological considerations, opinion characteristics, and citation history. Our results indicate, first, that precedents depreciate rather quickly and, for example, depreciate about 81 percent and 85 percent between their first and 20th years of age at the Supreme Court and courts of appeals, respectively. Second, few of the variables in our analysis have any appreciable influence on the pace of depreciation. Two variables capturing the citation history of a case have the most notable influence on depreciation, but even their effects are reasonably modest and somewhat short-lived. Third, while our study focuses on depreciation (i.e., the change in the frequency of citation over time), it also produces an important implication for citation itself (i.e., the number of times a case is cited in a given year). We show that prior studies significantly overestimate the effect of almost every variable used to explain citation rates because those variables become substantially less influential as cases age. Future studies must therefore take into account that the effect of an independent variable on citations is conditional on the age of a precedent. This study therefore contributes to our understanding of the process by which law, as observed through citations to cases, changes.

Do jurors give appropriate weight to forensic identification evidence? When judging the value of forensic evidence, are they sensitive to the probability of a false match? To answer these questions, we conducted two jury simulation experiments—the first with undergraduate participants, the second with members of a county jury pool. The experiments examined the weight that participants gave to forensic DNA evidence relative to Bayesian norms when evaluating a hypothetical criminal case. We found that aggregate judgments were generally consistent with Bayesian expectations, although people overvalued the DNA evidence when the probability of a false report of a match was high relative to the random match probability. Judgments of the chances the defendant was guilty varied appropriately in response to the variation in the probability of a false report of a match, as did verdicts. Our findings refute claims that jurors are always conservative Bayesians when evaluating forensic evidence and suggest, instead, that they use a variety of judgmental strategies and sometimes engage in fallacious statistical reasoning. In light of these findings, we identify circumstances in which forensic evidence may be overutilized, discuss implications for legal policy, and suggest additional lines of research.