Law Commons^™

Death By Police: When “Protecting And Serving” Goes Wrong, Hesper Mallis

Symposium of Student Scholars

The recent cases of law enforcement using lethal force in the United States have gained massive public attention. My dataset is from the Mapping Police Violence website. The website’s focus was to create a heat map to display where police killings occurred most frequently. The website has a dataset with information on 7,664 deaths of suspects. The variables in the dataset include age, sex and race of the suspect; geographic location; alleged threat level; alleged weapon; cause of death; and criminal charges against the officer. In addition, the variables include whether the individual had a mental illness, was armed or …

Marijuana Arrests In Toronto Canada: A Look Into The Canadian Criminal Justice System, Steven Tully

Symposium of Student Scholars

Marijuana related drug offenses made up fifty-eight percent of all Controlled Drugs and Substances Act offenses in Canada in 2016. On October 17, 2018, Canada legalized marijuana. As part of the efforts to legalize marijuana, descriptive statistics of single variables, like the age of the arrestees and the number of people arrested per year, were reported by the Toronto Star newspaper. The dataset analyzed in this research predates the legalization of marijuana and was collected from 1997 to 2002 on 5,226 individuals arrested in Toronto, Canada for simple possession of small quantities of marijuana. When an offender was arrested for …

Bias In Police Shootings: Is It Just An Opinion?, Phuong Ho

Symposium of Student Scholars

The claims of racism have drawn public attention toward police brutality and its impact on minorities. Is this just an opinion or is there any statistical evidence? Recent studies from The Atlantic have investigated the average age and ethnicity of victims from police killings in 2015-2016. As an Asian-American, I am motivated to examine the issue of police killings among races and other demographics to find any bias that is present. Using the dataset of 2,204 victims of police killings (2015-2016) collected by The Guardian, I will examine the following variables for bias: age, cause of death, armed/unarmed, race/ethnicity, and …

Power And Statistical Significance In Securities Fraud Litigation, Jill E. Fisch, Jonah B. Gelbach

All Faculty Scholarship

Event studies, a half-century-old approach to measuring the effect of events on stock prices, are now ubiquitous in securities fraud litigation. In determining whether the event study demonstrates a price effect, expert witnesses typically base their conclusion on whether the results are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, a threshold that is drawn from the academic literature. As a positive matter, this represents a disconnect with legal standards of proof. As a normative matter, it may reduce enforcement of fraud claims because litigation event studies typically involve quite low statistical power even for large-scale frauds.

This paper, written for …