Albert Yoon

The Luck of the Draw: Using Random Case Assignment to Investigate Attorney Ability

One of the most challenging problems in legal scholarship is the measurement of attorney ability. Measuring attorney ability presents inherent challenges because the nonrandom pairing of attorney and client in most cases makes it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between attorney ability and case selection. Las Vegas felony case data, provided by the Clark County Office of the Public Defender in Nevada, offer a unique opportunity to compare attorney performance. The office assigns its incoming felony cases randomly among its pool of attorneys, thereby creating a natural experiment free from selection bias. We find substantial heterogeneity in attorney performance that cannot be explained simply by differences in case characteristics, and this heterogeneity correlates with attorneys’ individual observable characteristics. Attorneys with longer tenure in the office achieve better outcomes for the client. We find that a veteran public defender with ten years of experience reduces the average length of incarceration by 17 percent relative to a public defender in her first year. While we find no statistical difference based on law school attended or gender, we find evidence that the public defender’s race correlates with sentence length, with Hispanic attorneys obtaining sentences that were up to 26 percent shorter on average than those obtained by black or white attorneys. We also find evidence suggesting that differences in sentencing may be driven partly by different plea bargaining behavior on the part of the public defenders.

Grades and incentives: assessing competing grade point average measures and postgraduate outcomes

In many educational settings, students may have an incentive to take courses where high grades are easier to achieve, potentially corroding student learning, evaluation of student achievement, and the fairness and efficiency of post-graduation labor outcomes. A grading system that takes into account heterogeneity of teacher standards and student ability could mitigate these problems. Using unique data from a major Canadian research university, we calculate student grade point averages (GPAs) net of course difficulty and find evidence that raw GPAs systematically distort student achievement across majors. We then link undergraduate performance and law school data. We find that adjusted GPAs better predict Law School Admissions Test scores, while the raw GPAs better predict admission to law school and grades in law school. These results suggest nuanced relationship between grades, incentives and subsequent academic outcomes. We conclude by discussing implications of our results for university leaders.

Love's Labor's Lost? Judicial Tenure Among Lower Federal Court Judges: 1945-2000

Jurists and legal scholars have long decried the diminishing real salaries of federal judges, claiming that this decline has adversely affected the willingness of federal judges to remain on the bench. Using data provided by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, this article analyzes the tenure trends of federal judges who retired from the bench during 1945-2000. Using time-series regression analysis, this article shows that contrary to these claims, tenure trends remained fairly stable over this period for both district and circuit courts. Indeed, the only observable trends were towards longer tenure. The data reveals, however, that recent judicial appointees are wealthier than their predecessors, which may reflect a possible selection effect in members of the bar willing to join the federal bench. Moreover, while judicial salaries have diminished, expenditures within the federal judiciary are growing at a geometric rate, suggesting that judges are receiving increasing non-salary benefits.

The post-modern lawyer: Technology and the democratization of legal representation

Abstract:In recent years, scholars and the media have chronicled the challenges facing the legal profession: notably declining law school enrolment, higher unemployment for law graduates, and technological advances that increasingly threaten the livelihood of lawyers. To many, these developments confirm suspicions that the legal profession is in an irreversible decline. This article takes a more sanguine view about the profession’s future. While technology has indeed contributed to the current struggles of the legal labour market, it has centred thus far on automating the rule-based tasks of lawyers. The latest technologies – still in their nascent stages – focus on facilitating how lawyers analyze more complex legal questions. I argue that these intelligence augmentation technologies will reduce the cost of legal services for both lawyers and litigants, democratizing the legal profession in the process.

Unintended Consequences: The Regressive Effects of Increased Access to Courts: The Regressive Effects of Increased Access to Courts

Small claims courts enable parties to resolve their disputes relatively quickly and cheaply. The courts limiting feature, by design, is that alleged damages must be small, in accordance with the jurisdictional limit at that time. Accordingly, one might expect that a large increase in the upper limit of claim size would increase the courts accessibility to a larger and potentially more diverse pool of litigants. We examine this proposition by studying the effect of an increase in the jurisdictional limit of the Ontario Small Claims Court. Prior to January 2010, claims up to

Litigant Resources and the Evolution of Legal Precedent

10,000 could be litigated in the small claims court. After January 2010, this jurisdictional limit increased to include all claims up to

Law in the Future

25,000. We study patterns in nearly 625,000 disputes over the period 2006–2013. In this article, we investigate plaintiff behavior. Interestingly, the total number of claims filed by plaintiffs does not increase significantly with the increased jurisdictional limit. We do find, however, changes to the composition of plaintiffs. Following the jurisdictional change, we find that plaintiffs using the small claims court are, on average, from richer neighborhoods. We also find that the proportion of plaintiffs from poorer neighborhoods drops. The drop‐off is most pronounced in plaintiffs from the poorest 10 percent of neighborhoods. We explore potential explanations for this regressive effect, including crowding out, congestion, increased legal representation, and behavioral influences. Our findings suggest that legislative attempts to make the courts more accessible may have unintended regressive consequences.

Academic Tenure: Yoon

This paper develops an informational model of litigation in which court decisions are a function of legal representation. In this model, resource constraints determine how much parties expend on legal representation. The allocation of resources across parties influences court decisions in two important ways. First, in individual cases the party with greater resources can produce more information, thereby increasing her probability of a favorable decision by the court. Second, as the cost of litigation increases relative to parties’ resources, courts have less information upon which to make decisions. We model the evolution of precedent as a dynamic externality under stare decisis. These factors determine the evolution of legal precedent. In areas of law in which parties on a particular side have persistently greater resources, the law is likely to evolve in a direction that favors that side. The extent of information provided determines the variability of outcomes.

Evaluating the Role of Brown V. Board of Education in School Equalization, Desegregation, and the Income of African Americans

The set of tasks and activities in which humans are strictly superior to computers is becoming vanishingly small. Machines today are not only performing mechanical or manual tasks once performed by humans, they are also performing thinking tasks, where it was long believed that human judgment was indispensable. From self-driving cars to self-flying planes; and from robots performing surgery on a pig to artificially intelligent personal assistants, so much of what was once unimaginable is now reality. But this is just the beginning of the big data and artificial intelligence revolution. Technology continues to improve at an exponential rate. How will the big data and artificial intelligence revolutions affect law? We hypothesize that the growth of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will have important effects that will fundamentally change the way law is made, learned, followed, and practiced. It will have an impact on all facets of the law, from the production of micro-directives to the way citizens learn of their legal obligations. These changes will present significant challenges to human lawmakers, judges, and lawyers. While we do not attempt to address all these challenges, we offer a short and positive preview of the future of law: a world of self-driving law, of legal singularity, and of the democratization of the law.

Damage Caps and Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study of Medical Malpractice Litigation in the South

In academia, a subset of faculty has tenure, which allows its beneficiaries to retain their professorships without mandatory retirement and with only limited grounds for revocation. Proponents of tenure argue it protects intellectual freedom and encourages investment in human capital. Detractors contend it discourages effort and distorts the academic labor market. This article develops a framework for examining academic tenure in the context of U.S. law schools. We construct a unique data set of tenured U.S. law professors who began their careers between 1993 through 2002, and follow their employment and scholarship for the first 10 years of their career. Across all journal publications, tenured faculty publish more frequently, are cited with roughly the same frequency, and place in comparable caliber of journal. These productivity gains, however, largely disappear when excluding solicited publications. These results suggest that legal academics continue to produce after tenure, but channel more of their efforts toward less competitive outlets.