The Rules of Inference

Although the term “empirical research” has become commonplace in legal scholarship over the past two decades, law professors have, in fact, been conducting research that is empirical—i.e., learning about the world using quantitative data or qualitative information—for almost as long as they have been conducting research. For just as long, however, they appear to have been proceeding with little awareness of, much less compliance with, many of the rules of inference, and without paying heed to the key lessons of the revolution in empirical analysis that has been taking place over the last century in other disciplines. The tradition of including some articles devoted exclusively to the methodology of empirical analysis, so well represented in journals in traditional academic fields, is virtually nonexistent in the nation’s law reviews. As a result, readers learn considerably less accurate information about the empirical world than the studies’ stridently stated, but often overly confident, conclusions suggest. To remedy this situation—both for the producers and consumers of empirical work—we adapt the rules of inference used in the natural and social sciences to the special needs, theories, and data in legal scholarship, and explicate them with extensive illustrations from existing research. We also offer suggestions for how the infrastructure of teaching and research at law schools might be reorganized so that it can better support the creation of first-rate empirical research without compromising other important objectives.Governmen

A Reply

Governmen

The Rules of Inference

Although the term empirical research has become commonplace in legal scholarship over the past two decades, law professors have in fact been conducting research that is empirical--that is, learning about the world using quantitative data or qualitative information--for almost as long as they have been conducting research. For just as long, however, they appear to have been proceeding with little awareness of, much less compliance with, many of the rules of inference, and without paying heed to the key lessons of the revolution in empirical analysis that has been taking place over the last century in other disciplines. The tradition of including some articles devoted exclusively to the methodology of empirical analysis--so well represented in journals in traditional academic fields--is virtually nonexistent in the nation\u27s law reviews. As a result, readers learn considerably less accurate information about the empirical world than the studies\u27 stridently stated, but overly confident, conclusions suggest. To remedy this situation both for the producers and consumers of empirical work, this Article adapts the rules of inference used in the natural and social sciences to the special needs, theories, and data in legal scholarship, and explicates them with extensive illustrations from existing research. The Article also offers suggestions for how the infrastructure of teaching and research at law schools might be reorganized so that it can better support the creation of first-rate empirical research without compromising other important objectives

Coding Variables

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116265/1/cv04.pd

Additivity for a class of unital qubit channels

Additivity of the Holevo capacity is proved for product channels, under the condition that one of the channels is in a certain class of unital qubit channels, with the other completely arbitrary. This qubit class includes the depolarizing channel. As a byproduct this proves that the Holevo bound is the ultimate information capacity of such qubit channels (assuming no prior entanglement between sender and receiver). Additivity of minimal entropy and multiplicativity of p-norms are also proved under the same assumptions

The Supreme Court During Crisis: How War Affects only Non-War Cases

Does the U.S. Supreme Court curtail rights and liberties when the nation’s security is under threat? In hundreds of articles and books, and with renewed fervor since September 11, 2001, members of the legal community have warred over this question. Yet, not a single large-scale, quantitative study exists on the subject. Using the best data available on the causes and outcomes of every civil rights and liberties case decided by the Supreme Court over the past six decades and employing methods chosen and tuned especially for this problem, our analyses demonstrate that when crises threaten the nation’s security, the justices are substantially more likely to curtail rights and liberties than when peace prevails. Yet paradoxically, and in contradiction to virtually every theory of crisis jurisprudence, war appears to affect only cases that are unrelated to the war. For these cases, the effect of war and other international crises is so substantial, persistent, and consistent that it may surprise even those commentators who long have argued that the Court rallies around the flag in times of crisis. On the other hand, we find no evidence that cases most directly related to the war are affected. We attempt to explain this seemingly paradoxical evidence with one unifying conjecture: Instead of balancing rights and security in high stakes cases directly related to the war, the justices retreat to ensuring the institutional checks of the democratic branches. Since rights-oriented and process-oriented dimensions seem to operate in different domains and at different times, and often suggest different outcomes, the predictive factors that work for cases unrelated to the war fail for cases related to the war. If this conjecture is correct, federal judges should consider giving less weight to legal principles established during wartime for ordinary cases, and attorneys should see it as their responsibility to distinguish cases along these lines.Governmen

Building An Infrastructure for Empirical Research in the Law

Governmen

How Good a Deal Was the Tobacco Settlement?: Assessing Payments to Massachusetts

We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991, to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the payments to Massachusetts under the tobacco settlement of November 1998. Whether these payments are viewed as appropriate compensation for Medicaid costs over time depends upon the rate of increase in future health care costs, the rate of decline in smoking, the proportion of smoking that should be attributed to the actions of the tobacco companies and the liklihood that state would have prevailed at trial. The costs to the Medicaid program are dwarfed by the internal costs to smokers themselves.

The metabolic inter-relationships between changes in waist circumference, triglycerides, insulin sensitivity and small, dense low-density lipoprotein particles with acute weight loss in clinically obese children and adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: Small, dense low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles are highly atherogenic and strongly associated with obesity-related dyslipidemia. The metabolic inter-relationships between weight loss induced changes in waist circumference, triglycerides, insulin sensitivity and small-dense LDL particles in clinically obese children and adolescents have not been studied. METHODS: Seventy-five clinically obese boys and girls (standardized body mass index 3.07 ± 0.59, aged 8-18 years) were recruited. Anthropometric, body composition and cardiometabolic risk factors were measured pre- and post-weight loss. RESULTS: There were highly significant reductions in anthropometric, body composition and cardiometabolic risk factors. Triglyceride change was positively correlated with LDL peak particle density and percentage LDL pattern B changes (relative abundance of small, dense LDL particles). Multiple regression analyses showed that changes in triglyceride concentration accounted for between 24 and 18% of the variance in LDL peak particle density and percentage LDL pattern B change, respectively. Changes in waist circumference and insulin sensitivity did not predict these changes in LDL characteristics. CONCLUSION: Acute and highly significant weight loss significantly decreased LDL peak particle density and percentage LDL pattern B. The change in triglycerides was a strong predictor of LDL peak particle density and percentage LDL pattern B change

Dynamic Responses to Labor Demand Shocks: Evidence from the Financial Industry in Delaware

This paper analyzes an important shock to local labor demand in the financial services sector: firm relocation to Delaware following a Supreme Court ruling and state legislation in the 1980s. Using synthetic controls and bordering states, I find significant effects on employment growth, the unemployment rate, and participation in the first decade. Employment spillovers to the nontradable sector and migration appear larger than estimates from shocks to the tradable sector. Effects persist for 10 to 20 years after Delaware loses its original policy-induced advantage. The shift towards a low unemployment sector explains this persistence, rather than direct productivity effects or agglomeration