637 research outputs found
Empirical Analysis and the Fate of Capital Punishment
In his dissenting opinion in Glossip v. Gross, Justice Breyer attempted to give content to the Supreme Courtâs prior command in Atkins v. Virginia that unless the imposition of the death penalty âmeasurably contributes to one or both of [the legitimate penological goals of deterrence and retribution], it âis nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering,â and hence an unconstitutional punishment.â Justice Breyerâs opinion illuminates the central role that empirical studies have played in death penalty litigation since Furman v. Georgia on issues ranging from the lack of deterrence associated with the death penalty; to racial and ethnic bias in its administration; to the extensive delays, cost, errors, and arbitrary implementation; and to the failure to limit capital punishment to the worst of the worst offenders.
Two months after Glossip, the battle over the empirical evaluation of capital punishment played out in the contentious 4-3 decision in State v. Santiago, in which the Connecticut Supreme Court found the death penalty unconstitutional in the wake of the state legislatureâs prior prospective abolition. The bitter judicial contention in both Glossip and Santiago over the evaluation of evidence of racial and ethnic bias and an array of other empirical issues highlights both the critical importance of empirical analysis to the fate of the death penalty and the difficulty that many judges have in properly evaluating statistical evidence. The statistically unsupportable attempts by the Stateâs expert to undermine the overwhelming evidence of racial disparity in capital charging in Connecticut underscores that highly flawed statistical evidence will often be pressed upon (or seized upon by) judges who may be ideologically inclined to accept work that true experts would readily reject. If the Supreme Court is able to effectively appraise the best empirical work in applying the Atkins standard, it is difficult to see how the death penalty could be sustained as a constitutional punishment. Unless the imposition of the death penalty âmeasurably contributes to one or both of these goals [deterrence and retribution], it âis nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering,â and hence an unconstitutional punishment.â â Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 318â19 (2002) (emphasis added)
The Effects of Fee Shifting on the Settlement Rate: Theoretical Observations on Costs, Conflicts, and Contingency Fees
Litigation costs could be conceived as a bribe to parties to reach a contractual agreement settling their dispute. The question of what effect fee-shifting rules might have on the rate of settlements in lawsuits is examined
The Law and Economics of Antidiscrimination Law
This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of discrimination based on animus, statistical discrimination, and cartel exploitation are analyzed for both race and sex discrimination. I explore the theoretical arguments for prohibiting private discriminatory conduct and illustrates the tensions that exist between concerns for liberty and equality. I also discuss the critical point that one cannot automatically attribute observed disparities in various economic or social outcomes to discrimination, and illustrate the complexities in establishing the existence of discrimination. The major empirical findings showing the effectiveness of federal law in the first decade after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are contrasted with the generally less optimistic findings from subsequent antidiscrimination interventions.
Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis
John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that 'shall-issue' laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall- issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall- issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly -- somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.
Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz (2005)
Donohue and Levitt (2001) argue that the legalization of abortion in the United States in the 1970s played an important role in explaining the observed decline in crime approximately two decades later. Foote and Goetz (2005) challenge the results presented in one of the tables in that original paper. In this reply, we regretfully acknowledge the omission of state-year interactions in the published version of that table, but show that their inclusion does not alter the qualitative results (or their statistical significance), although it does reduce the magnitude of the estimates. When one uses a more carefully constructed measure of abortion (e.g. one that takes into account cross-state mobility, or doing a better job of matching dates of birth to abortion exposure), however, the evidence in support of the abortion-crime hypothesis is as strong or stronger than suggested in our original work.
Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution morartoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific examples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in the specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty -- at least as it has been implemented in the United States -- is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just "reasonable doubt" about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty -- even about its sign.
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