Targeting Poverty in the Courts: Improving the Measurement of Ability to Pay

Ability-to-pay determinations are essential when governments use money-based alternative sanctions, like fines, to enforce laws. One longstanding difficulty in the U.S. has been the extreme lack of guidance on how courts are to determine a litigant’s ability to pay. The result has been a seat-of-the-pants approach that is inefficient and inaccurate, and, as a consequence, very socially costly. Fortunately, online platform technology presents a promising avenue for reform. In particular, platform technology offers the potential to increase litigant access, reduce costs, and ensure consistent and fair treatment—all of which should lead to more accurate sanctions. We use interviews, surveys, and case-level data to evaluate and discuss the experiences of six courts that recently adopted an online ability-to-pay assessment tool that streamlines and standardizes ability-to-pay determinations. Our findings suggest that the online tool improves accuracy and therefore the effectiveness of fines as punishments, and so it may make the use of fines as sanctions more socially attractive

Disaggregating Employment Protection: The Case of Disability Discrimination

Studies of the effects of employment protection frequently examine protective legislation as a whole. From a policy reform perspective, however, it is often critical to know which particular aspect of the legislation is responsible for its observed effects. The American with Disabilities Act (ADA), a 1990 federal law covering over 40 million Americans, is a clear case in point. Several empirical studies have suggested that the passage of the ADA reduced rather than increased employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. To the extent this is true, it is crucial to credibly disentangle the different features of this complex and multi-faceted law. Separately evaluating the distinct aspects of the ADA is important not only for determining how the law might best be reformed if some aspects of it produce negative employment effects, but also for improving our understanding of the potential consequences of ADA-like provisions in race and other civil rights laws. This paper exploits state-level variation in pre-ADA legal regimes governing disability discrimination to separately estimate the employment effects of each of the ADA's two primary substantive provisions. We find strong evidence that the immediate post-enactment employment effects of the ADA are attributable to its requirement of "reasonable accommodations" for disabled employees rather than to its potential imposition of firing costs for such employees. Moreover, the pattern of the ADA's effects across states suggests, contrary to widely discussed prior findings based on national-level data, that declining disabled employment after the immediate post-ADA period reflects other factors rather than the ADA itself.

Community Notification Policies

Community notification policies seek to prevent crime, raise awareness, or otherwise educate the public about criminal activity by requiring or permitting the police or other community actors to disseminate information to the public. Policies can focus on potential victims, potential offenders, the community at large, or some combination of these three. Victim-oriented policies seek to reduce the likelihood of victimization by encouraging precautionary behavior on the part of at-risk individuals. Offender-oriented policies publicize information (e.g., the severity of penalties or the likelihood of arrest) with the aim of deterring potential offenders from engaging in harmful activities. Community-oriented policies provide the public with information in hopes of increasing cooperation and communication with law enforcement. Policies are usually oriented toward more than one audience. To be effective at reducing criminal activity or its costs, community notification information must reach its target audience and its content must be clear, salient, and capable of altering behavior. Community notification policies also carry risks of unintentionally exacerbating criminal activity. On the whole, relatively little rigorous evidence exists on the consequences of these policies

Using ODR Platforms to Level the Playing Field: Improving Pro Se Litigation through ODR Design

Court-connected ODR has already shown itself capable of dramatically improving access to justice by eliminating barriers rooted in the fact that courts traditionally resolve disputes only during certain hours, in particular physical places, and only through face-to-face proceedings. Given the centrality of courthouses to our system of justice, too many Americans have discovered their rights are too difficult or costly to exercise. As court-connected ODR systems spread, offering more inclusive types of dispute resolution services, people will soon find themselves with the law and the courts at their fingertips. But robust access to justice requires more than just raw, low-cost opportunities to resolve disputes. Existing ODR platforms seek to replicate in-person procedures, simplifying and clarifying steps where possible, but litigants without representation still proceed without experience, expertise, guardrails, or the ability to gauge risk or likely outcomes. Injecting ODR with a dose of data science has the potential to address many of these shortfalls. Enhanced ODR is unlikely to render representation obsolete, but it can dramatically reduce the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and, on some dimensions—where machines can outperform humans—next generation platforms may be a significant improvement

Comment on \u27Judicial Compensation and Performance\u27

The most significant challenges to better understanding judicial behavior are lack of data and the absence of plausible exogenous variation in judicial environments. The random assignment of judges to cases has admittedly been helpful in gaining traction on the effects of judicial decisions (e.g., Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang 2018). Yet developing a full empirical account of “what judges maximize” (Posner 1993) would require a setting in which judges are randomly subjected to a wide variety of (real-world) environments with different costs, constraints, and rewards. This prospect remains pie in the sky, but that does not mean that we have not made some headway on the ground. For instance, researchers have deployed the random assignment of cases to judges to back out how judges respond to differences in case attributes when the characteristics of cases (e.g., severity) can be assessed ex ante (Leibovitch 2016) and to attempt to gauge how judicial decision making evolves over the course of the day or in response to an empty stomach (Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011; WeinshallMargel and Shapard 2011). These lines of research, however, have more to say about when judges depart from the merits of cases than about which traditional institutional features (e.g., compensation, selection) enhance judicial effort and improve accuracy

Improving Access to Justice in State Courts with Platform Technology

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes-often with the government-is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often the financial wherewithal to miss work or to pay for child care. In this Article, I investigate the effects of altering this structural baseline by studying the consequences of introducing online platform technology to improve citizen access to justice. In courts that adopt the technology, citizens are able to communicate with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to seek relief or negotiate a resolution through an online portal at any time of day. Examining many months of data from half a dozen adopting state courts, I present evidence that introducing this technology dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes for citizens to resolve their disputes and satisfy any fines or fees they owe. Default rates also plummet, and court personnel, including judges, appear to engage constructively with citizens when using the platform. From the perspective of state courts, disputes end more quickly, the percentage of payments received increases, and it takes less time for courts to receive those payments. Even citizens who do not use the platform may benefit from the technology\u27s introduction, presumably because they find they face less congestion when they physically go to a courthouse

Offenders and SORN Laws

Chapter 7 describes what we know about the effects of SORN laws on criminal behavior. A coherent story emerges from this review: there is virtually no evidence that SORN laws reduce recidivism or otherwise increase public safety. The chapter first delineates the various ways registration and notification alter the legal environment not only for registrants but also for nonregistrants, the public, and law enforcement. There are many channels through which SORN laws might impact the frequency of sex offenses, including some that would produce an increase in overall offending. The chapter assesses these possibilities in light of a large body of relevant empirical research, focusing on potential changes in registrant recidivism, nonregistrant criminal behavior, the geography of victimization, and the distribution of types of sex offenses and victims. Scholars have plumbed many different data sources using a range of methodologies, yet nearly every study finds no evidence that SORN laws – in particular, community notification laws – reduce sexual recidivism. In fact, notification laws may increase recidivism risk. The final section discusses registrant beliefs about the effects of SORN laws. In sum, the chapter comprehensively engages with the pressing question of whether SORN laws protect the public and concludes that they do no

Platform Procedure: Using Technology to Facilitate (Efficient) Civil Settlement.

In this chapter, we explore the ability of courts to enhance the role of substantive law in case outcomes by reducing party litigation costs. When it becomes less costly for parties to engage actively in dispute resolution, the shadow of substantive law should, in theory, become more pronounced and case outcomes should change (and hopefully become more accurate/efficient on average). To empirically investigate this hypothesis, we examine the consequences of a large state court’s implementation of court-assisted online dispute resolution (ODR) tools for its small claims docket. A central goal of this technology is to reduce litigation costs of all sorts so that parties are able to communicate easily and negotiate settlements quickly in the shadow of what is —or could be—efficient substantive law, thereby avoiding inefficient status quo outcomes, like default judgments. ODR tools enhance court efficiency and litigant satisfaction by giving parties on‐demand, inexpensive access to a private and secure platform to negotiate an agreement that fully resolves their dispute. We find that, by reducing costs, eliminating procedural inefficiencies, and placing decision-making power in the hands of the parties, platform technology reduces the likelihood of default and likely improves the substantive outcome of disputes

Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to de-identified data that overcome that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable nonrecipients in Michigan. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally eligible for expungement, just 6.5% obtain it within five years of eligibility. Drawing on patterns in our data as well as interviews with expungement lawyers, we point to reasons for this serious “uptake gap.” Second, those who do obtain expungement have extremely low subsequent crime rates, comparing favorably to the general population — a finding that defuses a common public-safety objection to expungement laws. Third, those who obtain expungement experience a sharp upturn in their wage and employment trajectories; on average, within one year, wages go up by over 22% versus the pre-expungement trajectory, an effect mostly driven by unemployed people finding jobs and minimally employed people finding steadier or higher-paying work

The Power of a Clean Slate

Tens of millions of Americans have criminal records, including about 20 million with felony convictions. Conviction records automatically trigger countless collateral legal consequences, such as occupational restrictions that bar employers from hiring qualified candidates. Moreover, research overwhelmingly shows that bearing a criminal record raises significant barriers to employment, housing, and various other opportunities. These persistent obstacles can overwhelm an individual’s efforts at reintegration and can aggravate poverty, inequality, and racial disparities in our society. And because factors like unemployment and housing instability contribute to crime risk, these effects in turn make society less safe