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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Influence Of The Race Of Defendant And The Race Of Victim On Capital Charging And Sentencing In California, Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Michael Laurence
The Influence Of The Race Of Defendant And The Race Of Victim On Capital Charging And Sentencing In California, Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Michael Laurence
Faculty Scholarship
The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 recognized racial and ethnic discrimination as a basis for relief in capital cases, expressly permitting several types of statistical evidence to be introduced. This statewide study of the influence of race and ethnicity on the application of capital punishment contributes to this evidence. We draw on data from over 27,000 murder and manslaughter convictions in California state courts between 1978 and 2002. Using multiple methods, we found significant racial and ethnic disparities in charging and sentencing decisions. Controlling for defendant culpability and specific statutory aggravators, we show that Black and Latinx defendants and …
Copyright And Economic Viability: Evidence From The Music Industry, Kristelia A. Garcia, James Hicks, Justin Mccrary
Copyright And Economic Viability: Evidence From The Music Industry, Kristelia A. Garcia, James Hicks, Justin Mccrary
Faculty Scholarship
Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate. We investigate the economic viability of content in a major content industry — commercial music — using a novel longitudinal dataset of weekly sales and streaming counts. We find that the typical sound recording has an extremely short commercial half-life — on the order of months, rather than years or decades — but also …
Street Stops And Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments In Young Urban Men's Legal Socialization, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller
Street Stops And Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments In Young Urban Men's Legal Socialization, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller
Faculty Scholarship
An examination of the influence of street stops on the legal socialization of young men showed an association between the number of police stops they see or experience and a diminished sense of police legitimacy. This association was not primarily a consequence of the number of stops or of the degree of police intrusion during those stops. Rather, the impact of involuntary contact with the police was mediated by evaluations of the fairness of police actions and judgments about whether the police were acting lawfully. Whether the police were viewed as exercising their authority fairly and lawfully shaped the impact …
Race And Selective Enforcement In Public Housing, Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, Adam Carlis
Race And Selective Enforcement In Public Housing, Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, Adam Carlis
Faculty Scholarship
Drugs, crime and public housing are closely linked in policy and politics, and their nexus has animated several intensive drug enforcement programs targeted at public housing residents. In New York City, police systematically conduct “vertical patrols” in public housing buildings, making tens of thousands of Terry stops each year. During these patrols, both uniformed and undercover officers systematically move through the buildings, temporarily detaining and questioning residents and visitors, often at a low threshold of suspicion, and usually alleging trespass to justify the stop. We use a case-control design to identify the effects of living in one of New York …
A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
Faculty Scholarship
The article uses two hand‐collected data sets to implement a novel research design for analyzing the precursors to patent quality. Operationalizing patent “quality” as legal validity, the article analyzes the relation between Federal Circuit decisions on patent validity and three sets of data about the patents: quantitative features of the patents themselves, textual analysis of the patent documents, and data collected from the prosecution histories of the patents. The article finds large and statistically significant relations between ex post validity and both textual features of the patents and ex ante aspects of the prosecution history (especially prior art submissions and …
The Origins, Nature, And Promise Of Empirical Legal Studies And A Response To Concerns, Theodore Eisenberg
The Origins, Nature, And Promise Of Empirical Legal Studies And A Response To Concerns, Theodore Eisenberg
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This Article describes the origins of three movements in legal academia: empirical legal studies (ELS), law and society, and law and economics. It then quantifies the distribution across scholarly fields (for example, economics and psychology) of authors in these movements’ journals and reports the impact of the movements’ scholarly journals. By focusing on two leading law and economics journals, this Article also explores the effect of a journal being centered in law schools rather than in a social science discipline. It suggests that ELS has achieved rapid growth and impact within the academic legal community because of (1) its association …
Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship?, Theodore Eisenberg
Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship?, Theodore Eisenberg
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
People conduct legal scholarship for many different reasons. This Article focuses on the demand for and reaction to scholarship that helps inform litigants, policymakers, and society as a whole about how the legal system works. Law schools do little to train generations of lawyers in how to systematically assess the state of the legal system and the legal system's performance. Schools leave such assessments largely to self-interested advocates and to other disciplines. Self-interested advocates have less interest in objective assessment of the system than in pushing preferred policy agendas. Academic disciplines other than law have a distinct advantage in that …