Case Studies
The right to counsel: Criminal prosecution in 19th century London
Bryan McCannon & Zachary Porreca
Economica, January 2025, Pages 285-321
Abstract:
We exploit a dataset of criminal trials in 19th century London to evaluate the impact of an accused's right to counsel on convictions. While lower-level crimes had an established history of professional representation prior to 1836, individuals accused of committing a felony did not, despite the prosecution being conducted by professional attorneys. The Prisoners' Counsel Act 1836 remedied this and first introduced the right to counsel in common law systems. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we identify the effect of the universal right to defence counsel. We find the surprising result that the professionalization of the courtroom led to an increase in the conviction rate. We argue that this effect was a consequence of the Act inducing a shift in the beliefs of jurors, who grew more likely to believe the evidence put before them once it could be challenged in an adversarial courtroom. We go further, and employ a topic modelling approach to the text of the transcripts to provide suggestive evidence on how the trials changed when the right to defence counsel was fully introduced, documenting a movement towards increased usage of precise and detailed language when discussing details of alleged offences.
Building a better lawyer: Experimental evidence that artificial intelligence can increase legal work efficiency
Aileen Nielsen et al.
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2024, Pages 979-1022
Abstract:
Rapidly improving artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have created opportunities for human–machine cooperation in legal practice. We provide evidence from an experiment with law students (N = 206) on the causal impact of machine assistance on the efficiency of legal task completion in a private law setting with natural language inputs and multidimensional AI outputs. We tested two forms of machine assistance: AI-generated summaries of legal complaints and AI-generated text highlighting within those complaints. AI-generated highlighting reduced task completion time by 30% without any reduction in measured quality indicators compared to no AI assistance. AI-generated summaries produced no change in performance metrics. AI summaries and AI highlighting together improved efficiency but not as much as AI highlighting alone. Our results show that AI support can dramatically increase the efficiency of legal task completion, but finding the optimal form of AI assistance is a fine-tuning exercise. Currently, AI-generated highlighting is not readily available from state-of-the-art, consumer-facing large language models, but our work suggests that this capability should be prioritized in the development of legal AI products.
Case of the Mondays: Examining Media Coverage of Oral Arguments Based on Weekday Selection
Rachael Houston & Eve Ringsmuth
Journal of Law and Courts, forthcoming
Abstract:
The US Supreme Court follows a fixed weekly schedule, with specific days assigned for tasks. Oral arguments -- held on select Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays -- are the only public part of the Court’s decision-making process. We argue that news outlets consider the Court’s schedule when deciding which arguments to cover. To test this, we analyze media coverage of oral arguments from the 2019, 2020, and 2021 terms. Our findings reveal a notable disparity, with Monday arguments receiving the most coverage. This highlights the influence of the Court’s schedule on media attention, shaping public awareness, and the perceived importance of cases.
How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing
Allison Harris & Maya Sen
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do judges’ professional backgrounds affect their rulings? We investigate this question by looking at the impact of judges’ public defender experience on sentencing. Leveraging thousands of sentences, we find that defendants assigned to a former public defender are, on average, less likely to be incarcerated. Their sentences are also sometimes shorter, which we show is partially due to former public defenders being less likely to give extreme punishments. Taken together, this means that even small increases in the number of former public defenders can result in thousands fewer people incarcerated. The findings make two key contributions. First, our findings provide crucial insight into disparities in the criminal legal system and how judge characteristics can play a significant role. Second, we showcase the potential impact of judges’ professional experience on decision-making. Both illustrate a new strategy through which politicians can influence policy -- by choosing judges based on their previous jobs.
Paying for performance? Attorneys' fees in fraud class actions
Stephen Choi, Jessica Erickson & A.C. Pritchard
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2024, Pages 899-926
Abstract:
This paper studies whether plaintiffs' lawyers matter in securities class actions. We use inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) to compare the results in cases led by top-tier firms against those brought by lower-tier firms. This technique addresses case selection effects by using all of the cases led by a top-tier firm and then weighting the cases led by lower-tier firms based on how similar these cases are to the cases led by top-tier firms. We do find that top-tier lawyers obtain better outcomes for shareholders in a subset of securities class actions, specifically the cases against the larger (although not the very largest) companies. Outside of these cases, we find that most of the difference in the results obtained by top- and lower-tier firms disappears when we balance observable characteristics using the IPW technique. Although the top-tier firms do not get better results in most cases, they do invest more hours and money into their cases.
Effects of Verbal Framing of Video and Attitudes Toward Police on Mock Jurors' Judgements of Body-Worn Camera Video
Jaihyun Park, Neal Feigenson & Ngayin Cheng
Applied Cognitive Psychology, November/December 2024
Abstract:
This study examined the effects of prosecution and defense opening statements describing video evidence on mock jurors' perceptions and interpretations of that evidence and ultimate judgments. Materials were based on an actual case in which a police officer was tried for murder after fatally shooting an unarmed driver at a traffic stop. The incident was recorded on the officer's body-worn camera. Participants exposed to the prosecution's verbal framing of the video judged the officer to be significantly more responsible for the driver's death than those not so exposed. Partisan verbal framing also significantly affected what participants reported having seen, in some instances making them more likely to agree with factual statements that were unambiguously false. The effect of verbal framing on participants' responsibility judgments was mediated by its effect on their inferential judgments and emotional responses. Attitudes toward police also significantly affected responsibility judgments, inferential judgments, and emotional responses.
The long-term impact of debt relief for indigent defendants in a misdemeanor court
Lindsay Bing et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 December 2024
Abstract:
US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Court-related debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Study participants were randomly selected to receive relief from all current and prior fines and fees assessed for criminal charges in the county. Fee relief reduced jail bookings 21 mo after randomization and the effect persisted over 44 mo of follow-up. Although fee relief reduced incarceration, financial sanctions had no effect on indicators of lawbreaking. Instead, the control group (who obtained no relief from fines and fees) were rearrested at significantly higher rates because of open arrest warrants for nonpayment. These results indicate the long-term and criminalizing effects of legal debt, supporting claims that financial sanctions disproportionately harm low-income defendants while contributing little to public safety.
Chain novel, or Markov chain? Estimating the authority of U.S. Supreme Court case law
Matthew Dahl
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2024, Pages 861-898
Abstract:
How does the authority of case law evolve over time? On the Dworkinian legal formalist view, cases increase in authority as they become more embedded in the “chain” of legal precedent, but on the Holmesian legal realist view, each case's authority is proportional to its ability to predict future legal outcomes. In this article, I show how modeling the citation network of U.S. Supreme Court case law not as a chain novel (à la Dworkin) but instead as a Markov chain (à la Holmes, or so I argue) unlocks an intuitive measure of case authority -- called HolmesRank -- that outperforms the existing approach in a variety of validation tasks. I then demonstrate how the authority scores produced using this Markov machinery empower the analysis of two important normative questions: (1) the ideological basis of lasting precedential authority and (2) the causal effect of the Supreme Court's citation choices on lower court compliance.