There is mounting evidence that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has influenced the information privacy policies and practices that firms adopt in relation to people outside of the E.U., even when that is not required by the E.U. regulation. We use a hand-coded dataset of privacy policies from firms’ U.S. and E.U.-facing websites to document and explain these kinds of international regulatory spillovers. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that spillovers are driven by the costs of complying with different standards in different parts of the same firm. In fact, 75% of the firms in our sample use the same privacy policy for their U.S. and E.U.-facing websites. At the same time, our findings do not support the conclusion that firms comply with the GDPR in their U.S.-facing privacy policies out of fear of being sanctioned if the policy is somehow applied to E.U. residents. Finally, we find that spillovers are more prevalent among firms with a physical presence in the E.U. This suggests that international networks of compliance professionals may play a significant and understudied role in regulatory compliance, perhaps by providing channels for norms and resources to move across borders.

One of the key policing innovations of the last three decades has been community-oriented policing. It is particularly important because it is one of the only proactive policing approaches that consistently improves citizen evaluations of the police. At the same time, a series of reviews have concluded that there is not persuasive evidence that community policing reduces crime. In this paper we argue that these conclusions are likely flawed because of what we term crime reporting sensitivity (CRS) bias. CRS bias occurs because community policing leads to more cooperation with the police and subsequently increased crime reporting. Such increased crime reporting bias adjusts crime prevention outcomes of community policing downward. We illustrate this process by reanalyzing data from the Brooklyn Park ACT Experiment (Weisburd et al., 2021). We begin by showing the specific crime categories that contribute most to CRS bias. We then use a difference-in-differences panel regression approach to assess whether the experimental intervention in Brooklyn Park led to significant CRS bias. Finally, we use bounded estimates from the Brooklyn Park Experiment to adjust meta-analytic results from prior community policing studies to examine whether the conclusion that community policing does not impact on crime would need to be revisited if CRS bias was accounted for. We find that adjusted estimates tell a very different, more positive, story about community policing, suggesting that future studies should recognize and adjust for CRS bias, or identify other measures not influenced by this mechanism.

Whether constitution-making should be constrained has long been debated, but little is known about whether it is possible. We make several contributions to this question. We start by providing a typology of three types of constraints on constitution-making: Substantive, Procedural, and Institutional. We next develop a positive theory of when these constraints are likely to influence drafters’ behavior. We then use a mixed-methods approach to explore these ideas in the context of Chile’s constitutional reform process. In a survey experiment conducted in Chile before citizens voted on the draft constitution, we find that most respondents supported constraints in the abstract, but that they also supported a popular policy initiative—nationalizing mines—that violated these same constraints. This suggests that popular opinion may not enforce constraints on constitution-making. However, in fieldwork conducted in Chile, we found evidence that Chilean political parties did rein in constitution-makers who wanted to ignore constraints. This suggests that constitution-making constraints may be more likely to be effective when enforced by political parties.

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—at least if the objective is to study legal reasoning. We ran the same high-context 2 × 2 factorial experiment of judicial decision-making focused on legal reasoning with 31 U.S. federal judges and 91 elite U.S. law students. We obtained diametrically opposed results. Judges’ decisions were strongly associated with one factor (sympathy, i.e., bias) but not the other (law). For students, it was the other way around. Equality between the two groups is strongly rejected. Equality of document-view patterns—a proxy for thought processes—and written reasons is also strongly rejected.

The allocative efficiency outcome predicted by the Coase theorem critically depends on the assumption that, barring high transaction costs, parties will bargain after litigation and misallocated entitlements by courts will be re-allocated through voluntary exchanges. Ward Farnsworth’s 1999 small-scale survey lent credence to the claim that parties do not bargain after litigation because of the endowment effect and the animosity created by litigation. Farnsworth’s sample is small and statistically biased. Yet no other article has tested whether parties in the real world would systematically fail to exchange for behavioral reasons. This paper combines seven different data sources to shed light on this issue. We survey 1511 practicing attorneys, who reported that a substantial minority of their clients settled with the other litigating party after courts had rendered decisions. We also examine over 300 hand-coded Taiwanese cases in which the landowner sued the illicit possessor for building a structure on the plaintiff’s property. Real estate transaction records of the land in dispute show that in 6% of the cases, the landowner registered a sale of property to the possessor after the litigation. Evidence from Google Street View and satellite pictures taken by the Taiwan government suggests that the exchange rate is higher than 6%. Logistic regressions suggest that post-litigation bargaining dynamics are at least partly rational — allocative efficiency and transaction costs (conventionally defined) still matter. To the extent that the pro se status proxies for animosity incurred during litigation, Farnsworth’s thesis is also supported.

In this paper we investigate whether gender is associated with the content of judicial opinions in the U.S. courts of appeals. Using a topic model analysis, we find that gender is a significant predictor of the content of judicial opinions. Two causal pathways could explain this result: (1) men and women judges write differently about the same cases; (2) men and women judges write about different cases, either due to assignment or selection effects. To untangle these two pathways, we carry out three additional analyses. First, we examine whether the United States as a party is associated with judge gender. We next examine whether case codes are associated with judge gender. Finally, we examine the relationship between topic prevalence and gender, controlling for case codes. Our findings lend greater support to the second pathway than the first. This result raises the prospect that prior work on gender-based differences in judicial behavior may be confounded by assignment or selection effects. Our results also raise normative concerns about gender disparities in voice and influence in the U.S. courts.

Does the partisan composition of three-judge panels affect how earlier opinions are treated and thus how the law develops? Using a novel data set of Shepard's treatments for all cases decided in the U.S. courts of appeals from 1974 to 2017, we investigate three different versions of this question. First, are panels composed of three Democratic (Republican) appointees more likely to follow opinions decided by panels of three Democratic (Republican) appointees than are panels composed of three Republican (Democratic) appointees? Second, does the presence of a single out-party judge change how a panel relies on earlier decisions compared to what one would expect from a panel with homogeneous partisanship? Finally, does the size of these potential partisan effects change over time in a way that would be consistent with partisan polarization on the courts? We find that partisanship does, in fact, structure whether earlier opinions are followed and that these partisan effects have grown over time—particularly within the subset of cases that we believe are most likely to be ideologically salient. Since legal doctrine is developed by building upon or diminishing past opinions, these results have important implications for our understanding of the development of the law.

We evaluate the statistical and conceptual foundations of empirical tests for disparate impact. We begin by considering a recent, popular proposal in the economics literature that seeks to assess disparate impact via a comparison of error rates for the majority and the minority group. Building on past work, we show that this approach suffers from what is colloquially known as “the problem of inframarginality”, in turn putting it in direct conflict with legal understandings of discrimination. We then analyze two alternative proposals that quantify disparate impact either in terms of risk-adjusted disparities or by comparing existing disparities to those under a statistically optimized decision policy. Both approaches have differing, context-specific strengths and weaknesses, and we discuss how they relate to the individual elements in the legal test for disparate impact. We then turn towards assessing disparate impact of search decisions among approximately 1.5 million police stops recorded across California in 2022 pursuant to its Racial Identity and Profiling Act (RIPA). The results are suggestive of disparate impact against Black and Hispanic drivers for several large law enforcement agencies. We further propose alternative search strategies that more efficiently recover contraband while also exerting fewer racial disparities.

The widely recognized phenomenon of federal judges retiring strategically has key implications for the composition of the judiciary, particularly given polarization between the two U.S. political parties. Using fine-grained measures of judicial ideology, we examine how ideology shapes such strategic retirements. First, we show that since Reagan’s election, Democratic appointees to lower federal courts have been more likely to retire strategically than Republican ones. Second, we find that more ideologically conservative Republican appointees are more likely to strategically retire than are moderate Republican appointees but only suggestive evidence of a similar pattern among more liberal Democratic appointees. Third, as explanation, we find that moderate Republican appointees appear to “wait out” retiring strategically under more conservative recent presidents, such as Donald Trump, opting instead to retire under Democrats such as Joe Biden. Taken together, our results offer a key insight: ideology, and not just party, can be an important factor in driving strategic retirement.

This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek government bonds governed by domestic Greek law. As the abrogation of gold clauses in US government bonds by the US Congress in 1933 had been, the Greek action was decried as violative of the rule of law and sure to negatively impact the future ability of Euro area sovereigns to borrow. We test whether the Greek action had negative spillovers on European government debt markets. We find no evidence of increased borrowing for even the most peripheral European economies from the Greek action.