This article provides empirical researchers with an introduction and guide to research designs based on variation in judge and examiner tendencies to administer treatments or other interventions. We review the basic theory behind the research design, outline the assumptions under which the...

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of...

The employment share of legal services in the U.S. more than doubled during 1970–1990, in stark contrast to stability during 1850–1970 and after 1990. The relative wage of lawyers and law firm partners also doubled between 1970 and 1990. We argue that this demand shift was driven by...

Gender inequality and discrimination still persist, even though the gender gap in the labor market has been gradually decreasing. This study examines the effect of the #MeToo movement on judges’ gender gap in their vital labor market outcome - judicial decisions on randomly assigned legal...

Gender inequality and discrimination still persist, even though the gender gap in the labor market has been gradually decreasing. This study examines the effect of the #MeToo movement on judges' gender gap in their vital labor market outcome-judicial decisions on randomly assigned legal cases in...

Because judges exercise discretion in how they handle and decide cases, heterogeneity across judges can affect case outcomes and, thus, preferences among litigants for particular judges. However, selection obscures the causal mechanisms that drive these preferences. We overcome this challenge by...

A defendant in criminal court should only be convicted if guilt is proven by the prosecution beyond any reasonable doubt. That is the burden of proof. Any doubt emerging should benefit the defendant. In this perspective, evidence from police investigations is challenged by defense lawyers to...

This article attempts to develop a L&E analysis of how lawyers use knowledge to interpret new phenomena. This analysis adopts the analytical tools which can be identified in Guido Calabresi’s interdisciplinary approach to law. We will not discuss the content of Calabresi’s theories either on...

American households increasingly rely on employer-sponsored defined contribution retirement plans to fund consumption in retirement. I show that an important factor that impacts these plans is litigation risk. Using a new database of over 35,000 plans covering more than $5 trillion in assets, I...

This chapter addresses the roles that individual lawyers may play working in the field of Election Law, while serving as The Campaign Lawyer. There is no single definition or typology: they work on campaigns of all sizes and at local, state, and federal levels; they serve as general counsel for...

The legal ethics of class actions is a mess, with many conflicting answers and lingering, unresolved questions. The culprit is a fundamental lack of agreement regarding the identity of the client, without which it is impossible to consistently resolve concerns about conflicts of interest and...

Using their leadership skills in a law firm and other organizations often requires lawyers to play a teaching role. For example, an American Bar Association task force report noted that even in a one-time transaction, “a good business lawyer will be a useful resource in teaching the client...

Patent attorneys are responsible for obtaining patents that bring the highest expected profits for their corporate clients. We investigate the role of patent attorney capability in determining the value of corporate patents. We find that a one standard deviation increase in legal expertise leads...

I investigate the effect of occupational licensing requirements on the size of the U.S. legal profession. In particular, I develop a method to estimate the relative quantitative importance of individual licensing requirements. I report three primary findings. First, I find that the bar exam has...

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is everywhere. And the recent explosion of new AI technologies and tools has introduced many new terms that you need to know to understand it. The technology fuels virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri, helps physicians to spot cancer in MRIs and allows your...

Judge IV designs rely on monotonicity—each judge being weakly stricter than more lenient judges in all cases. I directly measure monotonicity in judicial panels in four different settings and find that it is violated in up to fifty percent of cases. The monotonicity violations are not detected...

Politicians’ behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges. Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just...

Furthering an integrative ethics-as-practice framework, this paper explores the professional practices, self-understanding and ethics of lawyers working in the Germanic legal context. Existing studies of the legal profession often argue that changing conditions in law have led to a...

Early Modern historians have long been fascinated by the mercantile world of the late medieval and early modern periods. The reason for their fascination can be ascribed to the wealth, cosmopolitism, social capital and political clout that many of these merchants (mostly men) projected onto...

Experimental research on judicial decision-making is hampered by the difficulty of recruiting judges as experimental participants. Can students be used in judges’ stead? Unfortunately, no. We ran the same high-context 2×2 factorial experiment of judicial decision-making focused on legal...

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on...

As a complement to the English legal system that the British administration had already imposed in India, legal education first emerged within the country. The Presidency Towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were subject to various parts of English Common Law and English legislation in the year...

100 lawyers is a lot, especially for a case that never went to trial or saw a dispositive motion filed. Although Twitter v. Musk did not pan out as the corporate trial of the century, the attorney-appearance record it set still merits some moment. Twitter was a strange case across many...

I investigate the labor market outcomes of American lawyers after they are professionally disciplined. To do so, I match employment data for 672k lawyers in 2012 and 2020 to novel data on public disciplinary measures imposed by state licensing bodies since 1990. I use this data to study...

Having its first commercial breakthrough with ChatGPT, in 2023 artificial intelligence (AI) has rung in the fourth industrial revolution. This article outlines the technicalities and economics underlying generative AI, and what they mean for competition in digital markets and for antitrust and...

This paper considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession’s struggle with the challenges of post- modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society’s Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors’ education from ‘cradle to...

The American legal profession is at a critical inflection point, one that will likely result in dramatic changes in the ways in which consumers access legal guidance and the manner in which lawyers and others deliver it. Chat-enabled artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making,...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) entrusted the general counsel (GC) of public companies with overseeing a new system of internal controls and reporting misconduct at their firms. I use a hand-collected dataset tracking the backgrounds of inhouse lawyers to argue that SOX increased the value...

This working paper includes a collection of case notes written by those national judges who attended the European Networking and Training for National Competition Enforcers (ENTraNCE Judges2021). The training programme was organised by RSCAS between November 2020 and October 2021, with the...

In recent times, Nigeria has been the subject of various security challenges ranging from the persistent military attacks by the Niger Delta militants, Boko Haram, the herds men and farmers conflicts, kidnappings, etc. This paper seeks to examine the state of national security in Nigeria,...