We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. We find that the average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black countypoverty rate...

We argue that partisan elected judges have an incentive to redistribute wealth from out-of-state defendants (nonvoters) to in-state plaintiffs (voters). We first test the hypothesis by using cross-state data. We find a significant partisan effect after controlling for differences in injuries,...

On the day of their trial, a substantial number of felony defendants fail to appear. Public police have the primary responsibility for pursuing and rearresting defendants who were released on their own recognizance or on cash or government bail. Defendants who made bail by borrowing from a bond...

We investigate the forces that explain why trial awards differ across the United States. In 23 states judges are elected and in 10 they are elected via partisan elections. Elections have two important effects. First, defendants are often out-of-state nonvoters while plaintiffs are typically...

This article discusses data available for researchers interested in the U.S. civil justice system and illustrates the uses of the various datasets with some interesting findings. Our focus is on torts, defined as an injury to person or property that is not covered by contract and for which civil...

We reexamine Mustard and Lott's controversial study on the effect of "shall-issue" gun laws on crime using an empirical standard error function randomly generated from "placebo" laws. We find that the effect of shall-issue laws on crime is much less well-estimated than the Mustard and Lott...

California's Attorney General was pleased to announce that "An unintended but positive consequence of 'Three-Strikes' has been the impact on parolees leaving the state.The growth in the number of parolees leaving California is staggering." Law enforcement officers in other states were presumably...

This study finds that contingent fees benefit plaintiffs and do not cause higher awards.

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. The average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black county poverty rate of 1...

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. We find that the average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black countypoverty rate...