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Articles 1 - 30 of 35
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting “The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism”, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges
The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting “The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism”, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges
Articles
What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well‐ known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in “The dark figure of sexual recidivism,” Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimat[ing] actual recidivism rates . . . given observed rates of reoffending” (p. 171). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more importantly, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. …
Numbers, Patrick Barry
Numbers, Patrick Barry
Articles
Numbers can be numbing. Depend too much on them to make your case, pitch your product, or tell your story, and you risk losing your audience. This essay offers a way to way to use numbers—both large and small—in a manner that is at once more compelling and more concrete.
Lawyer As Soothsayer: Exploring The Important Role Of Outcome Prediction In The Practice Of Law, Mark K. Osbeck
Lawyer As Soothsayer: Exploring The Important Role Of Outcome Prediction In The Practice Of Law, Mark K. Osbeck
Articles
Outcome prediction has always been an important part of practicing law. Clients rely heavily on their attorneys to provide accurate assessments of the potential legal consequences they face when making important decisions (such as whether to accept a plea bargain, or risk a conviction on a much more serious offense at trial). And yet, notwithstanding its enormous importance to the practice of law (and notwithstanding the handsome legal fees it commands), outcome prediction in the law remains a very imprecise endeavor. The reason for this inaccuracy is that the three principal tools lawyers have traditionally relied on to facilitate outcome …
Controlling The Jury-Teaching Function, Richard D. Friedman
Controlling The Jury-Teaching Function, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
When evidence with a scientific basis is offered, two fundamental questions arise. First, should it be admitted? Second, if so, how should it be assessed? There are numerous participants who might play a role in deciding these questions—the jury (on the second question only), the parties (through counsel), expert witnesses on each side, the trial court, the forces controlling the judicial system (which include, but are not limited to, the appellate courts), and the scientific establishment. In this Article, I will suggest that together, the last two—the forces controlling the judicial system and the scientific establishment—have a large role to …
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
Articles
False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but …
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …
Prisoners' Rights Lawyers' Strategies For Preserving The Role Of The Courts, Margo Schlanger
Prisoners' Rights Lawyers' Strategies For Preserving The Role Of The Courts, Margo Schlanger
Articles
This Article is part of the University of Miami Law Review’s Leading from Below Symposium. It canvasses prisoners’ lawyers’ strategies prompted by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PLRA”). The strategies comply with the statute’s limits yet also allow U.S. district courts to remain a forum for the vindication of the constitutional rights of at least some of the nation’s millions of prisoners. After Part I’s introduction, Part II summarizes in several charts the PLRA’s sharp impact on the prevalence and outcomes of prison litigation, but demonstrates that there are still many cases and situations in which courts continue to …
Trends In Prisoner Litigation, As The Plra Enters Adulthood, Margo Schlanger
Trends In Prisoner Litigation, As The Plra Enters Adulthood, Margo Schlanger
Articles
The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), enacted in 1996 as part of the Newt Gingrich "Contract with America," is now as old as some prisoners. In the year after the statute's passage, some commenters labeled it merely "symbolic." In fact, as was evident nearly immediately, the PLRA undermined prisoners' ability to bring, settle, and win lawsuits. The PLRA conditioned court access on prisoners' meticulously correct prior use of onerous and error-inviting prison grievance procedures. It increased filing fees, decreased attorneys' fees, and limited damages. It subjected injunctive settlements to the scope limitations usually applicable only to litigated injunctions. It made …
Racial Disparity In Federal Criminal Sentences, M. Marit Rehavi, Sonja B. Starr
Racial Disparity In Federal Criminal Sentences, M. Marit Rehavi, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than …
Sex Offender Law And The Geography Of Victimization, Amanda Y. Agan, J. J. Prescott
Sex Offender Law And The Geography Of Victimization, Amanda Y. Agan, J. J. Prescott
Articles
Sex offender laws that target recidivism (e.g., community notification and residency restriction regimes) are premised—at least in part—on the idea that sex offender proximity and victimization risk are positively correlated. We examine this relationship by combining past and current address information of registered sex offenders (RSOs) with crime data from Baltimore County, Maryland, to study how crime rates vary across neighborhoods with different concentrations of resident RSOs. Contrary to the assumptions of policymakers and the public, we find that, all else equal, reported sex offense victimization risk is generally (although not uniformly) lower in neighborhoods where more RSOs live. To …
Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers
Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers
Articles
Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail …
Evidence-Based Sentencing And The Scientific Rationalization Of Discrimination, Sonja B. Starr
Evidence-Based Sentencing And The Scientific Rationalization Of Discrimination, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
This Article critiques, on legal and empirical grounds, the growing trend of basing criminal sentences on actuarial recidivism risk prediction instruments that include demographic and socioeconomic variables. I argue that this practice violates the Equal Protection Clause and is bad policy: an explicit embrace of otherwise- condemned discrimination, sanitized by scientific language. To demonstrate that this practice raises serious constitutional concerns, I comprehensively review the relevant case law, much of which has been ignored by existing literature. To demonstrate that the policy is not justified by countervailing state interests, I review the empirical evidence underlying the instruments. I show that …
Effects Of Clergy Reporting Laws On Child Maltreatment Report Rates, Frank E. Vandervort, Vincent J. Palusci
Effects Of Clergy Reporting Laws On Child Maltreatment Report Rates, Frank E. Vandervort, Vincent J. Palusci
Articles
Child maltreatment (CM) reporting laws and policies have an important role in the identification, treatment, and prevention of CM in the United States (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2012). Abuse by a member of the clergy “is not only a personal and emotional betrayal, but [also] a spiritual betrayal, with secrecy amplified by the unprecedented and systemic cover-up committed by the Church hierarchy” (Coyne, 2011, p. 15). Recent controversies have resulted in the consideration of changes in mandated U.S. reporting laws that include increasing requirements for clergy and extension to additional professions (Freeh, Sporkin, & Sullivan, …
Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward H. Kennedy
Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward H. Kennedy
Articles
The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to …
Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers
Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers
Articles
Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail …
Did Booker Increase Sentencing Disparity? Why The Evidence Is Unpersuasive, Sonja B. Starr
Did Booker Increase Sentencing Disparity? Why The Evidence Is Unpersuasive, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
The Sentencing Commission’s recent report on the effects of United States v.Booker makes a number of very worri- some claims.The most alarming is that the gap in sen- tences between otherwise similar Black and White men has nearly quadrupled: from 4.5 percent before Booker, to 15 percent after it, to 19.5 percent after United States v. Kimbrough and United States v.Gall. 1 The Commission further claims that interjudge disparity has increased in two-thirds of the federal districts, and that interdistrict variation has also increased.2 If its findings were accurate, and if these changes could be causally attributed to Booker and …
The Obama Justice Department's Merger Enforcement Record: An Armchair Reply To Baker And Shapiro, Daniel A. Crane
The Obama Justice Department's Merger Enforcement Record: An Armchair Reply To Baker And Shapiro, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
My recent Essay, Has the Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement?, examined the three major areas of antitrust enforcement—cartels, mergers, and civil non-merger—and argued that, contrary to some popular impressions, the Obama Justice Department has not “reinvigorated” antitrust enforcement. Jonathan Baker and Carl Shapiro have published a response, which focuses solely on merger enforcement. Baker and Shapiro’s argument that the Obama Justice Department actually did reinvigorate merger enforcement is unconvincing.
Has The Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement?, Daniel A. Crane
Has The Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement?, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
The Justice Department’s recently filed antitrust case against Apple and several major book publishers over e-book pricing, which comes on the heels of the Justice Department’s successful challenge to the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, has contributed to the perception that the Obama Administration is reinvigorating antitrust enforcement from its recent stupor. As a candidate for President, then-Senator Obama criticized the Bush Administration as having the “weakest record of antitrust enforcement of any administration in the last half century” and vowed to step up enforcement. Early in the Obama Administration, Justice Department officials furthered this perception by withdrawing the …
The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And The Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow
The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And The Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
Recent empirical legal scholarship on the consumer bankruptcy system has uncovered a marked rise in the proportion of elder Americans filing for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. But these studies have not probed the reasons behind that rise, an omission this Article seeks to address. Professor John Pottow and colleagues recently assembled the new dataset of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), the largest national sample of consumer debtors in this country, which he uses to explore the sources of elder bankruptcy. The findings are both striking and ominous. While multiple factors, such as health problems and medical debts, contribute to …
Reply To Richard A. Leo And Jon B. Gould, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien
Reply To Richard A. Leo And Jon B. Gould, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien
Articles
The following is a letter to the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law received from Professors Samuel Gross and Barbara O'Brien, responding to an article published in the Journal in Fall 2009 by Professors Richard Leo and Jon Gould. This letter is followed by a reply from Professors Leo and Gould. Professors Gross and O'Brien did not see the reply prior to the Journal going to press. As we have indicated before, we welcome letters to the Journal from readers on any topic covered in a prior issue. - Editors
Frequency And Predictors Of False Conviction: Why We Know So Little, And New Data On Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien
Frequency And Predictors Of False Conviction: Why We Know So Little, And New Data On Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien
Articles
In the first part of this article, we address the problems inherent in studying wrongful convictions: our pervasive ignorance and the extreme difficulty of obtaining the data that we need to answer even basic questions. The main reason that we know so little about false convictions is that, by definition, they are hidden from view. As a result, it is nearly impossible to gather reliable data on the characteristics or even the frequency of false convictions. In addition, we have very limited data on criminal investigations and prosecutions in general, so even if we could somehow obtain data on cases …
Maiming The Cubs, James J. White
Maiming The Cubs, James J. White
Articles
It is easy to believe that students are made anxious and even depressed by law school and that the anxiety and depression stay with many students throughout school. It is harder to believe that these stresses cause permanent and irreversible change and that the ills of lawyers are traced in any meaningful way to the stresses of the three years of law school.
What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger
What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger
Articles
More than a few people noticed that the American court system was seeing ever fewer trials before Marc Galanter named the phenomenon.' But until Galanter mobilized lawyers2 and scholars to look systematically at the issue, inquiry was both piecemeal and sparse. Over the past three years, in contrast, Galanter's research 3 and his idea entrepreneurship, crystallized in the "Vanishing Trial" label, has spawned if not a huge literature at least a substantial one. We have now gotten the benefit of sustained scholarly inquiry by researchers of many stripes. Their work has been largely, though not entirely, empirical, and so we …
Maiming The Cubs, James J. White
Maiming The Cubs, James J. White
Articles
In the last twenty years much has been written about the deleterious effect that law school has on the mental well-being of law students.' Many have called for "humanizing" law school. In support of their case, the advocates of humanizing cite numerous anecdotes, much scholarly writing in the psychology literature, and even a few rigorous studies of law students. A principal voice is that of Professor Krieger who has done the most careful and elaborate study, a study of students at two law schools.1 You should understand that Professor Krieger and his cohorts do not merely claim that we make …
Exonerations In The United States 1989 Through 2003, Samuel R. Gross, Kriten Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, Sujata Patil
Exonerations In The United States 1989 Through 2003, Samuel R. Gross, Kriten Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, Sujata Patil
Articles
On August 14, 1989, the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, Illinois, vacated Gary Dotson's 1979 rape conviction and dismissed the charges.1 Mr. Dotson-who had spent ten years in and out of prison and on parole for this conviction-was not the first innocent prisoner to be exonerated and released in America. But his case was a breakthrough nonetheless: he was the first who was cleared by DNA identification technology. It was the beginning of a revolution in the American criminal justice system. Until then, exonerations of falsely convicted defendants were seen as aberrational. Since 1989, these once-rare events have become …
Sometimes What Everybody Thinks They Know Is True, Richard D. Friedman, Roger C. Park
Sometimes What Everybody Thinks They Know Is True, Richard D. Friedman, Roger C. Park
Articles
This essay responds to D. Davis and W. C. Follette (2002), who question the value of motive evidence in murder cases. They argue that the evidence that a husband had extramartial affairs, that he heavily insured his wife's life, or that he battered his wife is ordinarily of infinitesimal probative value. We disagree. To be sure, it would be foolish to predict solely on the basis of such evidence that a husband will murder his wife. However, when this kind of evidence is cobmined with other evidence in a realistic murder case, the evidence can be quite probative. We analyze …
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Articles
Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: "Today... the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with that."4 Williams condemned racial profiling - "As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It never has been con-doned …
Dna As Evidence: Viewing Science Through The Prism Of The Law, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman
Dna As Evidence: Viewing Science Through The Prism Of The Law, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
In this article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. In our view, the two well-known reports on DNA evidence issued by the National Research Council (NRC) have been badly mistaken in their analysis of this problem. The mistakes are significant because the reports have carried great authority with American courts; moreover, the DNA Advisory Board of the FBI has endorsed the second …
Dna Database Searches And The Legal Consumption Of Scientific Evidence, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman
Dna Database Searches And The Legal Consumption Of Scientific Evidence, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
DNA evidence has transformed the proof of identity in criminal litigation, but it has also introduced daunting problems of statistical analysis into the process. In this Article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. In our view, the two well-known reports on DNA evidence issued by the National Research Council ("NRC"), each of which has carried great authority with the American courts on …
Probability And Proof In State V. Skipper: An Internet Exchange, Ronald J. Allen, David J. Balding, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman, David H. Kaye, Lewis Henry Larue, Roger C. Park, Bernard Robertson, Alexander Stein
Probability And Proof In State V. Skipper: An Internet Exchange, Ronald J. Allen, David J. Balding, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman, David H. Kaye, Lewis Henry Larue, Roger C. Park, Bernard Robertson, Alexander Stein
Articles
This is not a conventional article. It is an edited version of messages sent to an Internet discussion list. The listings begin with the mention of a recent opinion of the Connecticut Supreme Court, parts of which are reproduced below. The listings soon move to broader issues concerning probability and other formal systems, their limitations, and their uses either in court or as devices for understanding legal proof.