The good folks over at the Computational Legal Studies blog have an interesting take on the recently-passed H.R. 3962 (health care). Befitting the blog's overall "computational or complex systems" approach, the post contains more than a few interesting factoids. As Dan Martin Katz notes, "The bill is 1990 pages as 'typeset' by the House. However, the 'substantive' words contained in bill are no longer than the length of a Harry Potter Novel."
At some point today our blog will receive visitor number 500,000.
Good news -- the new NSF-funded Supreme Court Database Website is now up and running, and I can't imagine this won't make the database available to thousands more users via its easy-to-use interface. Not only can you download the most current version of the database and its companions, but you can also perform analyses right on the website. This is good stuff; check it out!
Below is a call for papers from the Culture, Society, and Intellectual Property CRN (Collaborative Research Network No. 14) of the Law and Society Association. The deadline for proposals is November 30, 2009, but earlier proposals are encouraged.
It seems everywhere I turn there is discussion of moving away from electing judges and toward merit selection systems, especially due to presumed negative effects of campaign contributions, and it made me wonder about the extent to which such a move is supported by the empirical research. So far, my inclination is to say it is not, given Bonneau and Hall's new book as well as Gibson's recent research. (However, the Brennan Center for Justice points to a review of Bonneau and Hall's book disputing its claims. ) This seems like the sort of "real world" research Senator Coburn was looking for, doesn't it? (If you're not familiar with Senator Coburn's amendment, see here. He seeks to abolish the Political Science program at NSF for being, for want of a better term, useless.)
According to Richard Nielsen over at the Social Science Statistics Blog, a paper by Angus Deaton (Princeton--Econ.) attempts to: "(1) discount the usefulness of instrumental variables for making causal inferences in development economics and (2) discount the usefulness of field experiments." I certainly agree with Richard that the paper is worth a read for those who work with (or criticize) instrumental variables.
In recognition of the growing number of law and graduate students lurking on ELS Blog and in an effort to promote and grow the empirical legal studies field, the ELS Blog editors periodically spotlight promising student research. Jeremy Babener's Note (NYU Law--3L), Justifying the Structured Settlement Tax Subsidy: The Use of Lump Sum Settlements, critically explores the long-assumed belief underneath structured settlements from an empirical perspective. An excerpted abstract follows.
"Structured settlements have been subsidized by federal, state, and local taxes for nearly three decades. The subsidy, or tax exclusion, which encourages personal injury claimants to forgo a lump sum settlement in favor of long-term periodic payments, is premised upon the belief that claimants prematurely dissipate lump sum settlements. This belief has long been held within the structured settlement industry, and is frequently cited as a proven fact. Anecdotal evidence from industry practitioners, representing a broad cross-section of interests, certainly suggests the belief to be true. However, this article explores the available empirical data. It concludes that the danger of the dissipating claimant has yet to be proven, and that citations relied upon as evidence lack applicability, or sometimes any substance at all."