Co-organizers Tonja Jacobi, Jonathan Nash & Joanna Shepherd are delighted to announce that CELS 2024, hosted by Emory University School of Law, will take place on Fri.-Sat., November 8-9, 2024. A call for papers will follow later this spring ..read more

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. federal government, through the CARES Act, FFCRA, RRA, and ARPA, provided as much as "$6 trillion in income support to households, a combination of loans, grants, and tax relief to firms and non-profits, funding for (public) health efforts, and intragovernmental grants to sub-national governments." These federal funds included "roughly $900 billion in aid to state and local government entities." And a recent paper, What Do State Do With Fiscal Windfalls? Evidence from the Pandemic, by Jeffrey Clemens (UCSD--econ.) et al., focuses on how sta ..read more

Hosted by BYU Law School in Provo, Utah, and scheduled for October 24-25, 2024, organizers of the 9th Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference invite proposals for individual papers and panels (additional conference info here). Conference organizers welcome proposals on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: applications of corpus linguistics to constitutional, statutory, contract, patent, trademark, probate, administrative, and criminal law in any state or nation; philosophical, normative, and pragmatic commentary on the use of corpus linguistics in the law; triangulati ..read more

While such questions as "are regulators across countries 'in the pockets' of large banks?" and "do supervisors provide favorable treatment when bailing out large, global systemically important banks?" persist, conventional wisdom strongly implies that "regulators around the world give [Too-Big-To-Fail] TBTF banks preferential treatment in bailouts relative to other banks, often viewed as an unfair advantage for these banks." While an unfair regulatory advantage tilting in favor of TBTF banks has "been engrained in the minds of banking researchers, policy makers, and the public around the world ..read more

If evidence of empirical legal studies’ growth was not already obvious enough in the peer-reviewed journal world, traditional student-edited law reviews also evidence a turn toward ELS as well. And no more so than perhaps the Northwestern University Law Review which is pleased to announce its 7th annual issue dedicated to empirical legal scholarship, to be published in March 2025. According to the student editors, they seek "to bring cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, empirical work to our legal audience, and enrich our understanding of the law, legal actors, and legal doctrine through robust an ..read more

Most empirical judicial decisionmaking scholarship on federal circuit courts tries to exploit something close to quasi-random assignments to three-judge appellate panels. While attention typically focuses on judge votes, in a recent paper, Partisan Panel Composition and Reliance on Earlier Opinions in the Circuit Courts, Stuart Minor Benjamin (Duke) et al. instead focus on whether panel composition (partisanship) influences how judges rely on prior case law. Drawing on a data set that includes "all published and unpublished federal appellate opinions in the Lexis database that were issued betw ..read more

Co-organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Scott Cunningham (Baylor—econ), the 13th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will be held at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL. Main Workshop: Monday – Friday, July 29--August 2, 2024; Advanced Workshop: Sunday -- Wednesday, August 4-7, 2024. Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard Univ.); Matching and Reweighting Designs for “Pure” Observational Studies (Brigham Frandsen, BYU); Panel Data and Difference-in-Differences (Yiqing Xu, Stanford); Instrum ..read more

The political science literature increasingly paints a picture of distinctive "red" and "blue" states that separate from each other on a growing number of issues. If accurate, one may plausibly assume that this separation would increasingly be reflected in differences among "red" and "blue" state criminal codes, especially because, as Paul Robinson (Penn.) et al. argue, "a jurisdiction’s criminal law rules commonly reflect that community’s most basic shared values, probably more than many if not most other areas of legislation." In a recent paper, Red Codes, Blue Codes? Factors Influencing the ..read more

Guide by the conference's theme: "The Era of AI and Sustainability: Opportunity and Challenge for Law and Economics," the AsLEA invites article manuscripts or abstracts or session proposals by March 31, 2024, for consideration. The conference, hosted at the National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), will include keynote addresses by Adam Chilton (Chicago) and Scott Baker (Wash U). For more (and updated) information click here; email inquiries to: aslea2024@ncku.edu.tw ..read more

When assessing whether a model warrants fixed- or random-effects, threats posed by, among other factors, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity typically loom large. A recent discussion of this topic emerged on the StataList (click here) and considers various approaches ..read more