While I've never used one myself, I detect an upward trend in "heatplots" (example below) for basic descriptive correlation coefficient graphs. A helpful discussion (along with coding suggestions) on what is possible with Stata's heatplot command is found here ..read more

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies October 13-14, 2023 Call for Papers University of Chicago Law School The 2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) is now accepting submissions. CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference). The Paper Submission Deadline is Thursday, June 29, 2023 (11:59 PM Cent ..read more

When it comes to resolving formal civil disputes, popular imagination, partly fueled by the media and entertainment industry, is dominated by "courtroom drama" and jury trials. Empirical work over the decades, however, paints quite a different picture, and one dominated by the "disappearing trial." Thus, as Jennifer Robbennolt (Illinois) et al. make clear in Settlement Schemas: How Laypeople Understand Civil Settlement, "for all the attention paid to the real and imagined drama of the courtroom, these depictions overlook the reality of how many disputes are resolved: through any means but tria ..read more

While perhaps old-hat for some (many), a quick new Stata tutorial video (click here) walks viewers through some of the basics incident to data importation. For old-time users (including those who may reflexively turn to StatTransfer programs for conversions), increasingly easy--and a wider array of--data transfer options remain much-welcome news ..read more

When it comes to explaining criminal sentences, conventional wisdom emphasizes either judges or, given that criminal convictions largely flow from negotiated plea agreements, prosecutors. A closer look, however, reveals far more nuance and complexity and a dynamic process involving multiple parties concurrently rather than a static event dominated by one actor. In a recent "closer look," Jeffrey Bellin (William & Mary) & Jenia Turner (SMU) explore 77 plea bargains in the first half of 2019. Noting that comprehensive empirical work on judicial responses to negotiated plea deals is spars ..read more

The Supreme Court upended summary judgment doctrine with a trilogy of cases in 1986. At the time--and largely persisting into current prevailing wisdom--it was assumed that the 1986 changes made summary judgment comparatively more available and, thus, of greater benefit to defendants. While empirical evidence remains somewhat scant, emerging findings paint a far more complex and nuanced picture. A recent contribution to this research literature comes from Jonathan Nash (Emory) and Daniel Sokol (USC). In The Summary Judgment Revolution that Wasn't, the authors lever six separate (though related ..read more

For experimental judicial decisionmaking studies, the "gold-standard" research design includes using actual judges as participants. My Cornell colleague (and good friend) Jeff Rachlinski is a leading scholar in this space. For an array of reasons (including practical reasons), too much of the experimental research in this field is hampered by researchers' use of students (including law students) as the experimental participants. To the extant that researchers seek to generalize results from judicial decisionmaking studies to the "universe of judges," conventional  wisdom suggests that the ..read more

While I haven't thought about this since grad school, a recent discussion on the StataList (here) provides a helpful, quick refresher on when F- and T-Tests converge and when they do not (and why ..read more

For one brief moment in time in 2022, to some it looked as though a Delaware judge was poised to order Elon Musk to purchase Twitter, over his objections, due to a contract breach. Had that happened, as Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (Penn) et al. note in Expecting Specific Performance, it would have been "the highest-profile specific performance order in living memory." The incident helped prompt Wilkinson-Ryan and colleagues to explore intuitions on specific performance through a series of mixed-method experiments. And what they find, on balance, are "fragile" intuitions. Levering a mix of survey and e ..read more

Co-organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Scott Cunningham (Baylor—econ), the 12th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will be held at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL. Main Workshop:  Monday – Friday, August 7-11, 2023; Advanced Workshop:  Monday – Thursday (midday), August 14-17, 2023; and Optional Machine Learning Primer:  Sunday afternoon, August 13, 2023. Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard Univ.), Matching and Reweighting Designs and Difference-in-Differe ..read more