We document judicial leniency on defendant birthdays across 5 million decisions. Our results are consistent with reference-dependent social preferences. First, French sentences are 1% fewer and around 5% shorter. Second, U.S. federal judges also round down sentences except when rounding up makes...

Comparative legal research is of greatest practical value to policymakers, and to the bench and bar, when grounded in the systematic collection and analysis of empirical data. By applying empirical research methods to comparative law questions, legal scholars can meaningfully contribute to...

We provide a selective survey of the literature on profiling by criminal justice agents, including changes in the nature of discrimination resulting from the proliferation of algorithms for prediction. We argue for a taxonomy of harms that differs somewhat from the conventional approach taken by...

This note is in reply to a review of my monograph Transnational Networks and Elite Self-Empowerment: The Making of the Judiciary in Contemporary Europe and Beyond (OUP 2018) by LSE Professor Conor Gearty, Vice-President of the British Academy titled The Courts in Europe Today: Subverting or...

The literatures on non-market strategy in business studies and the thematically intersecting field of lobbying and interest group research in political science both exhibit a profound blind spot when it comes to how corporate influencing unfolds in relation to the judiciary and the broader...

The 1991 Policy of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation was a complete game changer for the Indian economy and by an extension, for the justice system in the country. The Indian legal infrastructure needed reforms even before 1991; however, the cycle of reforms that started post 1991 gave...

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to measure disparate impact, regardless of its source, in the context of bail decisions. We show that omitted variables bias in pretrial release rate comparisons can be purged by using the quasi-random assignment of judges to estimate average pretrial...

In Romania, the appointment of top prosecutors is still one of the main competences of the executive power. The legislative procedure in force, which is incomplete and essentially devoid of meritocracy, has required the advice of international experts, such as the Venice Commission, to...

Public enforcement of law relies on the use of public agents, such as judges, to follow the law. Are judges motivated only by strategic interests and ideology, as many models posit, rather than a duty to follow the law? We use the random assignment of U.S. Federal judges setting...