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...

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...

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...

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...

Firm emission accounts for a large share of pollution. Based on the sample of 44 countries, this paper studies whether and how firms’ legal environment influences their environmental performance. After presenting new evidence on the positive link between civil law origin and firm environment...

Using federal judge ideology as an exogenous measure of firms’ ex ante litigation risk, we document that the initial public offerings (IPOs) of the firms headquartered in more liberal circuits are more underpriced. The effect is mitigated when plaintiffs’ pleading standards are more...

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...

This Article explores the concept of “judicial federalization doctrine.” The doctrine emanates from well-documented areas of federal constitutional law, including exactions, racially motivated peremptory challenges, the exclusionary rule, same-sex sodomy, marriage, and freedom of speech and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

We provide the first analysis of racial in-group bias in Type-I and Type-II errors. Using player-referee matched data from NBA games we show that there is no overall racial bias or in-group bias in foul calls made by referees. Similarly, there is no racial bias or in-group bias in Type-I errors...

The impact of technology on individual economic sectors has also reached the service industry. This article offers a discussion on the influence of information technologies (IT)and changes taking place as a result of the legal services market digital transformation.Thanks to the results of 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,...

Commentary about the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc., has focused on the nexus of patent and administrative law. But this overlooks a seismic and as-yet unappreciated copyright implication of the decision: it renders the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB)...

Island Judges explores the persistent differences in status among federal district judges in U.S. territories. Beginning with Congress’s decision to extend life tenure to federal judges in Puerto Rico in 1966, the Note traces the evolution of local and federal courts in U.S. territories over...

This report contains research following on from the 2015 study examining the nature of private commercial mediation in New Zealand. The aim of this research project is to examine gatekeepers’ perspectives on commercial mediation. There is a lack of empirical information on the nature and use...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

We examine the effect of hearing cases alongside female judicial colleagues on the probability that a federal judge hires a female law clerk. Federal judges are assigned to cases and to judicial panels at random and have few limitations on their choices of law clerks: these two features make the...

Anecdotal evidence often points to aging as a cause for reduced work performance. This paper provides empirical evidence on this issue in a context where performance is measurable and there is variation in mandatory retirement policies: U.S. state supreme courts. We find that introducing...

Each presidential administration faces its own challenges related to the ethics of government officials and lawyers. What distinguished the Trump presidency was the steady stream of news reports that related to controversies involving government lawyers. In examining various controversies, this...

The assessment of the legal professionals’ performance is increasingly important in the market of legal services to provide relevant information both to consumers and to law firms regarding the quality of legal services. In this article, we explore how computational indicators are produced to...

Using federal judge ideology as an exogenous measure of firms’ ex ante litigation risk, we document that the initial public offerings (IPOs) of the firms headquartered in more liberal circuits are more underpriced. The effect is mitigated when plaintiffs’ pleading standards are more...

This paper investigates whether and how litigant peer stock ownership by federal district judges affects characteristics of case outcomes for large corporate litigants. We find that industry-peer stock ownership by district judges is associated with the following outcomes for corporate litigants...

How do judges engage with foreign case law? While prior research identified some instances where courts are willing to cite foreign judgments, details about the mode of engagement and the motivation of such cross-citations are often left unexplored. This article aims to fill these gaps. It...

The metaverse is the emerging cyberspace realm were people and entities (and various forms of algorithms and artificial intelligence) will interact, engage in games, sports, and entertainment, buy and sell “real world” and “in the metaverse” goods and services, and otherwise get into...

What should be the ideal method to calculate the judge strength in India? Time and again the policymakers in the country have been confronted with this question. The earlier methods such as the judge to population ratio and the rate of disposal technique have been criticized for being...

Nationwide protests against police brutality in summer of 2020 coupled with the high rates of COVID19 death among Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) has brought to the foreground the role of the legal system in upholding structural racism and economic inequality. This renewed focus...

Many lawyers are drawn to a career in social justice, in part, to help others and, in part, to fulfill their own path to wellness. Advocacy that sustains personal well-being, however, also poses considerable obstacles to well-being. Some of these obstacles are inherent to social justice work but...

Although women have made significant strides in the legal profession, female attorneys continue to earn far less than male attorneys. Relying on survey data from a large sample of full-time attorneys in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of $35,000 at the median that cannot be explained by...

This brief paper explores the correlation and potential relationship between the composition of the legal profession and trends in litigation, in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, we ask whether there is a positive correlation between the numbers of lawyers and paralegals licensed to practice in...

In Roamnia, the judges and prosecutors staged unprecedented protests, largely supported by university professors and students, as well as civil society and actors. In essence, the protests came after the Parliament adopted the so-called 'justice laws', consisting in substantial changes in the...

We consider the design of a repeated contest in the presence of a potentially biased judge. Beliefs about the judge’s bias may discourage contestants from exerting effort. In a repeated contest, the identity of a previous winner influences these beliefs. The contest designer is able to commit...

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...

Since COVID-19 outbreak the legal industry is awash in concepts like legaltech, which are popping up in quite a number. It represents an engrossing fusion of technology, business, and legal expertise that can be applied to both the business of law and the practice of law. Currently, investment...