Author Archive for dave-hoffman
Contract Evolution
posted by Dave Hoffman
There’s a fantastic symposium issue out of NYU this month, devoted to evolution and innovation in contract terms. There are articles by the ridiculously productive trinity of Choi/Gulati/Posner, a wild piece by Kevin Davis on Contracts as Technology, and a very cool empirical paper by Marotta-Wurgler and Taylor on evolving terms in standard form contracting online. I’m obviously biased toward empirical work on this exact topic, so I’m a sucker for this stuff. But I do think that this kind of empirical and theoretical work is where contract scholarship should be heading in the next 10-20 years. Check it out.
May 24, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Posted in: Conferences, Contract Law & Beyond, Law School (Scholarship)
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Is it better for one student to get a job than n students to fail the bar?
posted by Dave Hoffman
A student’s final law school GPA predicts bar passage better than other independent variables. But the relationship isn’t causal: raising the mean GPA of all students does not promote bar passage. Indeed, some investigators have suggested that the inverse is more likely to be true. When GPA rises for all students, individuals at the bottom of the class aren’t sufficiently signaled that their grades are really and truly bad, and consequently such badly-warned students don’t approach bar study with the requisite degree of seriousness. That is, if a school has a mean of a 3.3 at graduation, the bottom 20% of the class probably has GPA of around a B-. B- students may well say to themselves “sure, I’m at the bottom of the class, but I’m not a C student! I’m not in danger of failing the bar!” But they are. In this perverse way, raising the mean increases the rate at which weaker students fail the bar, even as overall, grades are positively correlated with passing!
The puzzle deepens. Students often argue that employers focus on mean GPA to the exclusion of class rank. Given that students are competing with other schools (nationally and regionally), there are race-to-the-bottom pressures on each law school’s curve generated by employment markets. A school that produces students at the 50th percentile with a 3.5 mean will obtain better employment outcomes than one that produces students at the 50th percentile with a 3.0 mean. All else equal, schools should reduce barriers to employment. (Of course this result depends on employers indeed acting in the irrational manner described – ignoring or downplaying class rank and focusing on absolute GPA. This would be very, very difficult to test empirically, though I imagine someone could give it a shot using nifty studies.)
You see the tension, right? A higher mean simultaneously could boost employment in the middle and higher end of the class while also depressing bar passage at the lower end of the class. These contrasting outcome effects turn on psychological biases resulting from overemphasizing raw grades over percentile rank, but simply providing class rank instead of grades would cause employers to balk. The tension may lead administrators and faculty to an uncomfortable question: when the two conflict, should we privilege bar passage over employment? What is the appropriate calculus? Could we live with one additional student failing the bar if two got a job?
My own view is that the price for bar failure is so high that the number of jobs won in this calculus would have to be unrealistically high. Consequently lower means are to be preferred to higher ones at some schools. What do you think?
May 1, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching), Uncategorized
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Ranking: Law v. Undergrad
posted by Dave Hoffman
Inspired by this 2007 Taxprof post, I decided to compare the 2013 US News undergrad ranking to the 2013 overall law school rank. This project was a bit more complicated than it was six years ago, due both to scandal & to the proliferation of regionally rankings. But, ignoring schools that aren’t present on both lists, the results are illuminating. For figures, follow me after the jump.
March 24, 2013 at 6:46 pm
Posted in: Law School (Rankings)
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Free Advice to Incoming Law Review Boards
posted by Dave Hoffman
While academics angst, law journal editors toil to manage the fire hose of submissions, real and fake expedites, and the uncertainty that comes with a new job. Many journal editors now seem to have the goal of “improving their ranking“. Seven years ago (!) I wrote some advice on that topic. It seems mostly right as far as it goes, but I want to revise and extend those comments below, in letter form.
March 4, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship)
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The Pacific Legal Foundation May Challenge Law Review Affirmative Action
posted by Dave Hoffman
Via Josh Blackman comes this news:
“The Pacific Legal Foundation has sent requests under the California Public Records Act (the equivalent of FOIA) to the University of California Berkeley and University of California Davis, seeking information about how they use race and gender in making decisions about what articles to publish. You can download the requests here: [UC Davis PRA request; UC Berkeley PRA request.] The letters were sent to the Dean of the law schools, and carbon copied to the Editor in Chief and the Faculty Adviser.”
The PLF demands a response by March 2.
February 23, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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What is the Point of Symposia?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Over at the Faculty Lounge, the estimable Michelle Meyer argues that it’s possibly inconsistent to take account of race, gender, and sexual orientation in symposia invitations but not to do so when selecting articles in law reviews. Her post is thoughtful and well-written, though I believe it rests on a false premise. Go over there and read it and then come back to find out which one.
February 17, 2013 at 9:46 pm
Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship)
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Dodge v. Wholefoods?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Like many corporate law teachers, I have mixed views about the old chestnut of Dodge v. Ford. On the one hand, it’s very quotable. On the other, shareholder wealth maximization is a normative goal, not a rule with teeth. Still you go to war with the data you have.
Now we’ve more data – useful for an exam fact pattern, at least! An alert student (thanks, C.M) found this choice quote in a recent interview of Wholefoods CEO John Mackey:
“JOHN MACKEY: I think that Whole Foods does have higher purposes. We take them very seriously. We don’t exist primarily to maximize profits.
We’re fulfilling the mission that we set for ourselves of helping people to live healthier lives, to hopefully reverse this obesity crisis we have in America. Whole Foods does feel this sense of responsibility to try to make a difference. And that filters through our team member base to our customers. We really are united around kind of our mission as an organization. That really makes a difference.”
Now, obviously this is a branding statement – which could be interpreted as a way to make money by convincing customers to pay more for fruit than they ought to. And maybe nothing Mackey says should be taken very seriously. See, e.g., fascism & sockpuppets. Indeed, he’s certainly said CSR-like things like this before. But it’s still striking to see a CEO say essentially what Henry Ford said (and was punished for saying) in Ford v. Dodge. In the interview, Mackey also was asked about why his perspective is rarely articulated by CEOS. Check out his answer after the jump.
February 15, 2013 at 11:45 am
Posted in: Corporate Law
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Why Is Privatized Procedure So Rare?
posted by Dave Hoffman
For some time, I’ve been mulling over how closely parties can tailor the rules of civil procedure to their own purposes. That is: can parties write enforceable contract terms which state that if they sue each other, the ordinary procedural rules won’t apply? Do such contracts exist? For example, parties might contract to be able to take 5 depositions in a case instead of the default 10. Or they might dispose of the rules of hearsay. The literature on this topic of private procedure arguably started with the Scott/Triantis piece, Anticipating Litigation in Contract Design, and has gotten new momentum from Bone, Kapeliuk/Klement, Dodge, and Drahozal/Rutledge. My contribution, freshly up on SSRN, ended up being slightly more empirical than I’d expected — though I guess this won’t surprise any of our long-time readers. In Why Is Privatized Procedure So Rare?, I try to explain why there is actually so little private procedure in places we’d expect to see it:
“Increasingly we hear that civil procedure lurks in the shadow of private law. Scholars suggest that the civil rules are mere defaults, applying if the parties fail to contract around them. When judges confront terms modifying court procedures — a trend said to be explosive — they seem all-too-willing to surrender to the inevitable logic of private and efficient private ordering.
How concerned should we be? This Article casts a wide net to find examples of private contracts governing procedure, and finds a decided absence of evidence. I search a large database of agreements entered into by public firms, and a hand-coded set of credit card contracts. In both databases, clauses that craft private procedural rules are rare. This is a surprising finding given recent claims about the prevalence of these clauses, and the economic logic which makes them so compelling.
A developing literature about contract innovation helps to explain this puzzle. Parties are not rationally ignorant of the possibility of privatized procedure, nor are they simply afraid that such terms are unenforceable. Rather, evolution in the market for private procedure, like innovation in contracting generally, is subject to a familiar cycle of product innovation. Further developments in this field will not be linear, uniform and progressive; they will be punctuated, particularized and contingent.”
Download it here. I’d love your comments. It’s out in the scrum, but I’m intending to continue to revise it as data continues to come in.
February 14, 2013 at 10:33 am
Posted in: Civil Procedure, Contract Law & Beyond, Empirical Analysis of Law
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Affirmative Action for Law Scholarship
posted by Dave Hoffman
There are several issues in this unfolding story about Scholastica, law review submissions, and “diversity” preferences. Let’s break them out.
- I’m shocked! Shocked!: Over at Prawfs, Professor Mannheimer and various anonymous commentators think that Orin, Josh and I are naive. Everyone knows that law reviews routinely take race, gender and sexual orientation into account when choosing between articles. Indeed, Josh got an email from a former editor at the California Law Review saying that the practice “is nothing new and not exactly a secret.” Well, shucks. I guess I’m the sucker here. Even if this had crossed my mind, I would have naively thought that law faculties would never permit law student boards to make decisions about articles based on race, gender and sexual orientation without clearly thinking through whether such practices were legal, and without setting forth an explicit and public set of guidelines vetted by university counsel’s office. Honestly, the idea that California, NYU, Boston College, and other law reviews are thinking about my sexual orientation when they go forward with a “board review” is so unbelievably offensive that I’m still having some trouble wrapping my head around it. So, yup, I’m shocked.
- But everyone else is doing it: On the prawfs thread, several anonymous commentators stated that diversity preferences (however defined) are no worse than preferences that boards already express for (or against) elite school letterhead. There are two points to make here in response. First, the best law journals already engage in blind review, and using letterhead as a proxy for quality is antiquated and embarrassing. It’s not a defense of a bad practice that another bad practice exists. Second, though it’s not well thought out and should be abolished, at least the intuition behind letter-head bias is rationally related to what I thought the law review’s ends were: to select the best piece of scholarship. But what’s the intuition behind picking people, not papers? That law review placement is a “good” owned by the law review that wise and benevolent boards should redistribute in the ways that seem best to them?
- Scholastica’s just an enabler: I can’t quite figure these folks out. They commented yesterday that they were just giving reviews what they wanted. But then some editors wrote me to say that they didn’t want this widget – and that they only clicked on it because it was so easy to do. Indeed, Iowa appears to have de-clicked the widget yesterday in response to this thread. In the best possible light, it seems to me that Scholastica’s developers are simply importing other disciplines’ norms and preferences into the law without thinking carefully about how you might want to have different tools for faculty editors than unsupervised student boards. But maybe that’s not the light to see Scholastica in. As I wrote yesterday, their high price, preference for a different kind of scholarship, and exclusivity campaign might suggest that far from being merely a “platform”, they are hoping to use digital architecture to change law review behavior. I’d love to hear more from them about what their goals were and are going forward for legal scholarship.
- Until such questions are answered, my view is that of a commentator from yesterday: vote with your feet. Don’t use Scholastica unless the journal absolutely insists, as very, very few do. Consider also sending emails to the faculty advisors of journals that are exclusive to ask them if they are on board with this potentially radical, and radically troubling, shift in law review standards and selection processes.
February 14, 2013 at 9:52 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Scholastica & Law Review Selection
posted by Dave Hoffman
As several commentators noted (most in private emails, because they are afraid of negative consequences in the submission market), a very disturbing aspect of Scholastica’s new submission process is that it appears to facilitate and encourage law reviews to use sexual orientation, race, and gender in selection decisions. Josh Blackman has investigated, and written a very useful follow-up post which I hope you all will read.
My own view is that whatever the merits of law reviews giving “plus” points to authors at less prestigious schools,* providing plus points on account of race, gender, and sexual orientation is a terrible, terrible practice, especially if the plus points are awarded in an opaque manner by a largely unsupervised student board at an instrumentality of the state. Scholastica appears to take the position that it’s just giving journals what they want here. Would it feel the same way if journals were planning to use sexual orientation and race as negative factors? (Which, from a certain perspective, is exactly what they may be planning on doing.)
Mike Madison, writing on this topic in the fall, suggested that Scholastica is leading the charge toward a privatization of legal scholarship, with all of the associated pathologies (lack of transparency, etc.) That sounds right. Why, again, are faculty at schools like California (Berkeley), NYU, Iowa, and USC on board with this development?
*This too is a bad idea, but that’s a topic for a separate post.
February 13, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Against Scholastica
posted by Dave Hoffman
Like many of you, I’ve an article out in the Spring submission season. (More on that in a separate post later.) Let the agonizing begin! Seriously, where’s the thread?
This year, in addition to ExpressO, email, website submission, Redyip, and printed copies, we’ve a new way to deliver our articles to their ultimate masters: Scholastica. You may have learned about Scholastica when your favorite law review wrote you to inform you that they were exclusively taking submissions through that system, or when your associate dean told you that the institution would prefer not to pay pay more per submission than ExpressO for a substantially similar service.
Here are some key things you might not know:
- As far as I can tell only two of the top fifty journals – NYU and Iowa – are exclusive to Scholastica. “Exclusive” for other journals appears to mean “we’d prefer.”
- Scholastica is very hostile to the currently way that legal scholarship is selected — they push double-blind peer review and don’t very much like student editing. This isn’t surprising, because as far as I can tell, none of the developers went to law school, served on a law review, or writes for legal audiences. They are, respectively, a sociology graduate student, a former historian, and a political scientist. There are many things one could say in defense of our current multiple-submission, student-selection, system. None appear on the Scholastica page.
- Scholastica asks for your sexual orientation and other demographic information (include a free-form place to talk about “additional comments that demonstrate diversity”) and then provides that information to each submitting journals that request it. Apparently the theory is that journals will want to take identity politics into account when making selection decisions. [For more, see blackman's post on this topic, which I hadn't seen before writing this.]
- Did I mention that Scholastica is more expensive that ExpressO and infinitely more expensive than emailing the journal directly?
I think Scholastica might be a good deal for journals – it takes care of publishing problems, and it will significantly reduce the flow of submissions. I can also see why graduate students from other disciplines would find our tiny corner of the world to be odd. But I don’t see why anyone would ever submit through their system unless absolutely forced to, especially when they appear determined to import some unattractive aspects of other disciplines into legal academic publishing, which is already quite ugly.
What I don’t particularly understand is why faculty of the institutions running law reviews which are now exclusive to Scholastica are permitting this radical turn, which almost certainly will result in more concentration of prestige publication in the hands of prestige authors (who have the money to pay for multiple submissions at $5.00 each). Er. Reading that sentence again, I guess I understand after all.
That all said, Scholastica, please don’t lose my submission to NYU! I’ve never even gotten a rejection from those folks – maybe this year you can gin one up?
February 13, 2013 at 9:14 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Pick up the Phone!
posted by Dave Hoffman
From Redstone Federal Credit Union’s credit card agreement:
“Collection. If your Account should become past due, or otherwise in default, you will accept telephone calls from us regarding collection of your Account. You understand that the calls may be automatically dialed and a recorded message may be played. You agree that such calls shall not be “unsolicited” calls for the purpose of state or federal law.”
Translation: screening us is breach of contract!
December 20, 2012 at 9:43 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond
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The Good Life and Gun Control
posted by Dave Hoffman
Like many of you, I’ve been horrified by the events in Newtown, and dismayed by the debate that has followed. Josh Marshall (at TPM) thinks that “this is quickly veering from the merely stupid to a pretty ugly kind of victim-blaming.” Naive realism, meet thy kettle! Contrary to what you’ll see on various liberal outlets, the NRA didn’t cause Adam Lanza to kill innocent children and adults, nor did Alan Gura or the army of academics who helped to build the case for an individual right to gun ownership. Reading discussions on the web, you might come to believe that we don’t all share the goal of a society where the moral order is preserved, and where our children can be put on the bus to school without a qualm.
But we do.
We just disagree about how to make it happen.
Dan Kahan’s post on the relationship between “the gun debate”, “gun deaths”, and Newtown is thus very timely. Dan argues that if we really wanted to decrease gun deaths, we should try legalizing drugs. (I’d argue, following Bill Stuntz, that we also/either would hire many more police while returning much more power to local control). But decreasing gun deaths overall won’t (probably) change the likelihood of events like these:
“But here’s another thing to note: these very sad incidents “represent only a sliver of America’s overall gun violence.” Those who are appropriately interested in reducing gun homicides generally and who are (also appropriately) making this tragedy the occasion to discuss how we as a society can and must do more to make our citizens safe, and who are, in the course of making their arguments invoking(appropraitely!) the overall gun homicide rate should be focusing on what we can be done most directly and feasibly to save the most lives.
Repealing drug laws would do more — much, much, much more — than banning assault rifles (a measure I would agree is quite appropriate); barring carrying of concealed handguns in public (I’d vote for that in my state, if after hearing from people who felt differently from me, I could give an account of my position that fairly meets their points and doesn’t trade on tacit hostility toward or mere incomprehension of whatever contribution owning a gun makes to their experience of a meaningful free life); closing the “gun show” loophole; extending waiting periods etc. Or at least there is evidence for believing that, and we are entitled to make policy on the best understanding we can form of how the world works so long as we are open to new evidence and aren’t otherwise interfering with liberties that we ought, in a liberal society, to respect.”
Dan’s post is trying to productively redirect our public debate, and I wanted to use this platform to bring more attention to his point. But, I think he’s missing something, and if you follow me after the jump, I’ll tell you what.
December 19, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Courts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Culture, Current Events, Law and Psychology
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Unrepresentative Turkers?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Like many others, I’ve been using Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit subjects for law & psychology experiments. Turk is (i) cheap; (ii) fast; (iii) easy to use; and (iv) not controlled by the psychology department’s guardians. Better yet, the literature to date has found that Turkers are more representative of the general population than you’d expect — and certainly better than college undergrads! Unfortunately, this post at the Monkey Cage provides a data point in the contrary direction:
“On Election Day, we asked 565 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers to take a brief survey on vote choice, ideology and demographics. . . . We compare MTurk workers on Election Day to actual election results and exit polling. The survey paid $0.05 and had seven questions: gender, age, education, income, state of residence, vote choice, and ideology. Overall, 73% of these MTurk workers voted for Obama, 15% for Romney, and 12% for “Other.” This is skewed in expected ways, matching the stereotypical image of online IT workers as liberal—or possibly libertarian since 12% voted for a third party in 2012, compared to 1.6% percent of all voters. . . In sum, the MTurk sample is younger, more male, poorer, and more highly educated than Americans generally. This matches the image of who you might think would be online doing computer tasks for a small amount of money…”
Food for thought. What’s strange is that every sample of Turkers I’ve dealt with is older & more female than the general population. Might it be that Turk workers who responded to a survey on election habits aren’t like the Turk population at large? Probably so, but that doesn’t make me copacetic.
December 19, 2012 at 9:56 am
Posted in: Law and Psychology
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The Problem With Voting About Corporate Policies
posted by Dave Hoffman
The problems of corporate democracy are well illustrated by this embarrassing showing:
“The largest experiment yet in direct voting ended with a whimper on Monday, when Facebook closed its user polls on its new proposed terms of service, with what looked to be just 668,872 of Facebook’s 1.01 billion global users having even cast a vote, or just 0.067 percent (sixty-seven tenths of a percent) . . . Kicking-off December 6, Facebook had given all of its over 1.01 billion users around the globe one full week to vote on the changes it has proposed to its key “governing documents,” the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy, which spell out what type of user data Facebook can collect and what Facebook may do with it.”
Regarding corporate democracy (and its cousin, shareholder franchise): sounds nice, too bad people don’t act like they want it.
December 10, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Posted in: Corporate Law
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When is it ok to be “descriptive”
posted by Dave Hoffman
I presented a taxonomy of federal litigation today to a terrific audience at Rutgers-Camden. As I’ve covered in exhausting detail, the paper sets out to describe how lawyers organize causes of action together into complaints. It uses a method called spectral clustering to illustrate the networks of legal theories that typically are pled together. (It does some more stuff, but that’s the gist.) As often happens when presenting this particular paper, it was pointed out to me that the project lacks a clearly defined normative “so what”. This is basically correct. The “so what” of the paper is “this is a different, more-finely grained, way to see how attorneys think and produce cases. With pretty pictures. How do you like them apples?”
As I said, I tend to get the so-what objection quite often when presenting this paper, and it’s pushed my co-authors and I to make the paper clearer about the implications of the method. At the same time, it has made me even more aware of the bias in legal writing to come up with papers that do more than taxonomize, or describe. This is a well-known problem with the legal academy. True, taxonomies can be highly successful – Solove’s Taxonomy article is just one recent hit in a long parade of exceptionally good papers that basically try out different ways to organize legal concepts. But those papers generally pitch the contribution of taxonomies as systems to harmonize doctrine, or because they illustrate something about the world that needs fixing, or they uncover a missing category that is novel and interesting.
What’s less common is work that is no more than descriptive – this is what the world looks like; this is what happened – and doesn’t go on to fix or recommend a single thing. Often such work is derided as mere reportage, a practitioner’s piece, or (worse) an uninteresting collection of facts, put together without a synthesis of why we should care. (Actually, some papers are attacked on all three grounds.) But other times, descriptive work is seen universally to be immensely important and valuable, even if it doesn’t advance any prescriptive agenda. Some of the middle-period Law and Society papers have this feel, though of course L&S generally is quite ideological.
You may be wondering: what’s the so-what of this post? Here it comes:
-what is your sense of the appropriate criteria for deciding that purely descriptive scholarship makes a contribution?
-relatedly, if you were advising a first-time scholar, would you advise against writing a paper that is missing a policy solution in Part IV?
My answer to the first question is that schools and faculties vary widely, and consequently I’d say the risk averse response to the second question is very, very clear. Discuss.
November 26, 2012 at 8:42 pm
Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)
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Empirical Studies Workshop
posted by Dave Hoffman
Intrigued by the goings on at CELS VII? Join the revolution. Andrew Martin asked me to post the following:
Title: Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop, May 22-24, 2013
On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 through Friday, May 24, 2013, Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin will be teaching their annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop. This workshop will be held in Los Angeles, and is co-sponsored by USC Gould School of Law and Washington University Law. There is more information available about the workshop here:
http://law.usc.edu/
The Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop is for law school and social science faculty interested in learning about empirical research. The instructors provide the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data. Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop. Topics to be covered include research design, sampling, measurement, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and linear regression.
November 13, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law
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CELS VII: Low Variance, High Significance
posted by Dave Hoffman
[CELS VII, held November 9-10, 2012 at Stanford, was a smashing success due in no small part to the work of chief organizer Dan Ho, as well as Dawn Chutkow (of SELS and Cornell) and Stanford's organizing committee. For previous installments in the CELS recap series, see CELS III, IV, V, and VI. For those few readers of this post who are data-skeptics and don’t want to read a play-by-play, resistance is obviously futile and you might as well give up. I hear that TV execs were at CELS scouting for a statistic geek reality show, so think of this as a taste of what’s coming.]
Survey Research isn't just for the 1%!
Unlike last year, I got to the conference early and even went to a methods panel. Skipping the intimidating “Spatial Statistics and the GIS” and the ominous “Bureau of Justice Statistics” panels, I sat in on “Internet Surveys” with Douglas Rivers, of Stanford/Hoover and YouGuv. To give you a sense of the stakes, half of the people in the room regularly use mTurk to run cheap e-surveys. The other half regularly write nasty comments in JELS reviewer forms about using mTurk. (Oddly, I’m in both categories, which would’ve created a funny weighting problem if I were asked my views.) The panel was devoted to the proposition “Internet surveys are much, much more accurate than you thought, and if you don’t believe me, check out some algebraic proof. And the election.” Two contrasting data points. First, as Rivers pointed out, all survey subjects are volunteers, and thus it’s a bit tough to distinguish internet convenience samples from some oddball scooped up by Gallup’s 9% survey response rate. Second, and less comfortingly, 10-15% of the adult population has a reading disability that makes self-administration of a survey prompt online more than a bit dicey. I say: as long as the disability isn’t biasing with respect to contract psychology or cultural cognition, let’s survey on the cheap!
Lunch next. Good note for presenters: avoid small pieces of spinach/swiss chard if you are about to present. No one will tell you that you’ve spinach on a front tooth. Not even people who are otherwise willing to inform you that your slides are too brightly colored. Speaking of which, the next panel I attended was Civil Justice I. Christy and I presented Clusters are Amazing. We tag-teamed, with me taking 9 minutes to present 5 slides and her taking 9 minutes to present the remaining 16 or so. That was just as well: no one really wanted to know how our work might apply more broadly anyway. We got through it just fine, although I still can’t figure out an intuitive way to describe spectral clustering. What about “magic black box” isn’t working for you?
November 12, 2012 at 11:33 am
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Contract Law & Beyond, Empirical Analysis of Law
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A Grouchy Post About the Election
posted by Dave Hoffman
I’m on record as basically hating blogging by law professors about politics, never more so than when the election is near. Obviously, given the state of commentary on the more popular law professor blogs of late, too few agree with me about how unenlightening most political blogging by professors is. Well, it takes all kinds! And there’s always Orin Kerr, writing about actual cases, to read.
But here’s something we can all agree on, I would hope. Law professors have no business telling students who to vote for. I wonder what percentage of the academy already has, or will, violate this simple rule in the next two days? My bet: over 25%, and the age distribution would be illuminating. Some additional percentage have probably told their students that as lawyers-in-training they have an extra obligation to participate in the “civic duty” of voting. This, in my mind, is nearly as bad, since it is usually motivated by some implicit sense that the targets of the message are going to vote the way you want them to.
Whew. Glad I got that off my chest!
November 4, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Posted in: Politics
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At CELS 2012
posted by Dave Hoffman
I’m really looking forward to next week’s 7th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, to be held at Stanford. Here’s the preliminary program. As usual, I’ll blog the conference after the fact. If there are particular papers you want to make sure I get to and highlight, drop me a line. As a taste, here’s a line from an abstract that made me very curious about the presentation to follow: “Our overall estimates suggest that pornography caused between 10 and 25 percent of all divorces in the United States in the sixties and seventies.” Caused?! That must be some kicker of an instrumental variable.
November 2, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Posted in: Conferences
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