Adam S. Chilton

The Laws of War and Public Opinion: An Experimental Study

Research examining whether the laws of war change state behavior has produced conflicting results, and limitations of observational studies have stalled progress on the topic. To bring new evidence to the debate, I have conducted a survey experiment that directly tests whether one mechanism hypothesized to drive compliance with international law - changes in public opinion - creates pressure to comply with the laws of war. The results provide qualified support to research suggesting that democracies may comply with the laws of war when there is the expectation of reciprocity.

The Influence of History on States’ Compliance with Human Rights Obligations

There is considerable variation in countries’ respect for human rights. Scholars have tried to explain this variation on the basis of current conditions in countries—such as democracy and civil war—and events from the recent past, such as ratification of human rights treaties. This literature has ignored the influence that geographic factors and historical events may have on human rights performance. Drawing on the literature on economic development, which has shown that institutions, events, and conditions from the distant past heavily influence the rate of economic growth across countries today, we argue that scholars should study whether the same factors have influenced modern human rights performance. Our exploratory look at the data suggests that respect for human rights today may be related to the geographic location of affected populations centuries ago, the nature of the institutions that emerged at that time, and cultural traits that have been passed down from generation to generation. These preliminary results suggest that human rights scholars could make substantial progress by building on the work of development economics.

An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship

Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that finds that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet no one has used statistical methods to test the parallel hypothesis that legal scholarship reflects the political biases of law professors. This paper provides the results of such a test. We find that, at a statistically significant level, law professors at elite law schools who make donations to Democratic political candidates write liberal scholarship and law professors who make donations to Republican political candidates write conservative scholarship. These findings raise questions about standards of objectivity in legal scholarship.

The Political Motivations of the United States’ Bilateral Investment Treaty Program

The Untied States has signed 47 Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) over the last three decades. The standard explanation for why the United States’ government signed those BITs is that it was motivated by a desire to promote the development of international investment law and to protect American capital invested abroad. An alternative explanation, however, is that the United States has largely used BITs as a foreign policy tool to improve relationships with strategically important countries in the developing world. This project uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to assess whether the United States was motivated to sign BITs based on investment considerations or political considerations. The qualitative evidence suggests that U.S. executive branch officials viewed BITs as a potential way to cement and strengthen relationships with politically important countries. The quantitative evidence suggests that proxies for investment considerations — like trade and FDI flows — are weak predictors of U.S. BIT formation, but that political considerations — like military aid and whether a country was formerly a communist state — are consistently statistically significant predictors. Taken together, the evidence supports the argument that political considerations are better predictors of the BITs the United States signed than investment considerations.

Challenging the Randomness of Panel Assignment in the Federal Courts of Appeals

A fundamental academic assumption about the federal courts of appeals is that the three judge panels that hear cases have been randomly configured. Scores of scholarly articles have noted this “fact,” and it has been relied on heavily by empirical researchers. Even though there are practical reasons to doubt that judges would always be randomly assigned to panels — such as courts might well want to take into account the scheduling needs of their judges — this assumption has never been tested. This Article is the first to do so, and it calls the assumption into question.To determine whether the circuit courts utilize random assignment, we have created what we believe to be the largest dataset of panel assignments of those courts constructed to date. Using this dataset, we tested whether panel assignments are, in fact, random by comparing the actual assignments to truly random panels generated by code that we have created to simulate the panel generation process. Our results provide evidence of nonrandomness in the federal courts of appeals.To be sure, the analysis here is descriptive, not explanatory or normative. We do not ourselves mean to suggest that strict randomness is a desirable goal and indeed note that there are many good reasons for departing from it. Our aim is to test an existing scholarly assumption, and we believe our findings will have implications for the courts, court scholars, and empirical researchers.

International Law, Constitutional Law, and Public Support for Torture

The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, we conducted a survey experiment to explore the impact of international and constitutional law on public support for torture. We found that a bare majority of respondents in our control group support the use of torture, and that presenting respondents with arguments that this practice violates international law or constitutional law did not produce a statistically significant decrease in support. These findings are consistent with prior research suggesting, even in democracies, that legal prohibitions on torture have been ineffective.

Optimal Design of Guest Worker Programs: An Introduction

A large number of countries around the world have adopted guest worker programs for low-skilled workers. These programs—also known as temporaryworker programs—include initiatives that have brought seasonal farmhands to the United States from Mexico, industrial laborers from Turkey to Germany, and construction workers from India to the United Arab Emirates. These programs are typically offered by relatively prosperous host countries seeking cheap, and usually low-skilled, labor from nationals of poor home countries. Although there are many differences between guest worker programs, most share a set of standard features.1 Most notably, the programs usually allow noncitizens to work in a host country for a fixed period of time without a definite path to citizenship or permanent immigrant status. In addition, guest workers are not given the full slate of political and economic rights that citizens and permanent immigrants enjoy. Nor do they benefit from the special international regimes that govern political refugees. Guest worker programs also normally tie workers to specific employers and require the noncitizen to work in preapproved industries. Workers participating in programs with these features are employed in an enormous range of industries—including construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and household service—and countries around the world. Host countries use these programs to meet demands for low-wage workers without having to make long-term commitments to the im-

The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity

We compare the ideological balance of the legal academy to the ideological balance of the legal profession. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We find that 15% of law professors, compared to 35% of lawyers, are conservative. After controlling for individual characteristics, however, this 20 percentage point ideological gap narrows to around 13 percentage points. We argue that this ideological uniformity marginalizes law professors, but that it may not be possible to improve the ideological balance of the legal academy without sacrificing other values.

Rights Without Resources: The Impact of Constitutional Social Rights on Social Spending

Constitutions around the world have come to protect a growing number of social rights. This constitutionalization of social rights has generally been met with approval from academics, human-rights activists, and policy makers. But despite this widespread support, there is hardly any evidence on whether the inclusion of rights in constitutions changes how governments provide social services to their citizens. We take up this question by studying the effect of adopting the constitutional rights to education and health care on government spending. Using a data set of 196 countries’ constitutional rights and data from the World Development Indicators, we employ a variety of empirical tests to examine if the rights to education and health care are associated with increases in government spending. Our results suggest that the adoption of these social rights is not associated with statistically significant or substantively meaningful increases in government spending on education or health care.

Reciprocity and Public Opposition to Foreign Direct Investment

There is considerable evidence that the United States has imposed restrictions on foreign investments in response to other countries not providing reciprocal market access. It is unclear, however, whether the public supports basing investment policy on reciprocity. To explore this issue, we administered a series of conjoint and traditional survey experiments in the United States and China. Our experiments produced three important results. First, a lack of reciprocity does increase opposition to foreign acquisitions of domestic firms. Second, a lack of reciprocity produced a larger increase in opposition than the economic considerations we tested. Third, although our respondents were supportive of punishing countries with restrictive investment policies, they were less supportive of rewarding countries with open investment policies.