Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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Phil C. Neal
No full textPhotograph courtesy of the University of Chicago Law School. For rights and permissions information for this photo, please contact [email protected]://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/phil_neal_images/1002/thumbnail.jp
Phil C. Neal
No full textPhotograph courtesy of the University of Chicago Law School. For rights and permissions information for this photo, please contact [email protected]://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/phil_neal_images/1005/thumbnail.jp
Gerhard Casper, Informal 1
No full textGerhard Casper, the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law, dean of the Law School, and provost of the University of Chicago. Later in his career, Mr. Casper served as president of Stanford University (1992-2000).
University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-09434], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
View information about rights and permissions.https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/gerhard_casper_images/1006/thumbnail.jp
Assessing Affirmative Action\u27s Diversity Rationale
Get PDFEver since Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke made diversity in higher education a constitutionally acceptable rationale for affirmative action programs, the diversity rationale has received vehement criticism from across the ideological spectrum. Critics on the right argue that diversity efforts lead to “less meritorious” applicants being selected. Critics on the left charge that diversity is mere “subterfuge.” On the diversity rationale’s legitimacy, then, there is precious little diversity of thought. In particular, prominent scholars and jurists have cast doubt on the diversity rationale’s empirical foundations, claiming that it rests on an implausible and unsupported hypothesis.
To assess the diversity rationale, we conduct an empirical study of student-run law reviews. Over the past several decades, many leading law reviews have implemented diversity policies for selecting editors. We investigate whether citations to articles that a law review publishes change after it adopts a diversity policy. Using a dataset of nearly 13,000 articles published over a sixty-year period, we find that law reviews that adopt diversity policies see median citations to their volumes increase by roughly 23% in the ensuing five years. In addition to exploring the effect of diversity policies on median citations, we also explore the effect of diversity policies on mean citations. When doing so, our estimates are consistently positive, but they are largely not statistically significant at conventional levels
These findings have widespread implications. If diverse groups of student editors perform better than nondiverse groups, it lends credibility to the idea that diverse student bodies, faculties, and groups of employees generally perform better. We thus view these results as empirically supporting the much-derided diversity rationale—support that could prove critical as affirmative action confronts numerous threats
Harry A. Bigelow, Informal
No full textHarry A. Bigelow, Informal 1. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-00678], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
View information about rights and permissions.https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/harry_bigelow_images/1002/thumbnail.jp
Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards
No full textWe study the implications of stricter tenure standards in law schools, an environment in which 95 percent of all tenure-track hires receive tenure. To do so, we construct a novel data set of the articles and citation counts of 1,712 law professors who were granted tenure at top-100 law schools between 1970 and 2007. We first show that pretenure research records are highly predictive of future academic impact. We then simulate the effects of applying stricter tenure standards using predictions of law professors’ future academic impact at the time of their tenure decisions. We find that increasing tenure denial rates to the same level as hard-science departments—which would require increasing denial rates by 30 percentage points—could more than double the median posttenure academic impact of the faculty that law schools initially tenure
Unexpected Effects of Expected Sanctions
No full textThe economic analysis of law enforcement holds that greater expected sanctions lead to greater compliance. The literature on positive and negative incentives holds that rewards and sanctions—or carrots and sticks—have identical first-order incentive effects. We extend the basic model of law enforcement in three ways. We allow agents to opt out of the regulatory regime, we allow for enforcement errors, and we model agents who vary in at least one trait in addition to their cost of compliance. We show that, following these three realistic modifications of the basic model, the two fundamental conclusions just described do not hold. Greater expected sanctions do not necessarily lead to greater compliance; carrots and sticks are not substitutes in their incentive effects. We also show that adding taxes and subsidies to the regulatory toolkit does not expand the set of achievable outcomes
Optimal Enforcement with Heterogeneous Private Costs of Punishment
No full textWe formalize the idea that regulatory devices may generate different incentive effects for different individuals. These unequal incentive effects can generate social costs by causing some individuals to be overdeterred and others to be underdeterred. This is an underappreciated dimension over which one ought to compare the efficiency of various regulatory tools. We then note various methods to reduce inefficiencies caused by unequal incentive effects. Among others, we show that combining tools that have negatively related effects can improve welfare, increasing the probability of detection can be preferable to imposing large transferable sanctions, and regulators should incur real costs to be able to make more extensive use of unvarying instruments
Transaction Cost Economics, Labor Law, and the Gig Economy
No full textThe rapid growth of technology not only is creating innovative goods and services, but it is also altering the workplace and the traditional understanding of relationships between employee and employer. This can be seen today with the rise of the gig economy and alternative work arrangements. Our paper seeks to explain how technology has reduced the transaction costs of contracting in the market. In particular, we identify the innovations that have led to reductions in triangulation, transfer, trust, and measurement costs. These costs are relevant for creating greater exchanges between consumers and labor suppliers and, hence, more work for contractors and freelancers. Innovations that reduce measurement costs also reduce the firm’s costs of outsourcing contract work relative to employing. We conclude with a discussion of the radical implications for labor law.
You will never get to perfection because transaction costs are always positive, but they can be reduced. (Epstein 2015a, p. 791
