James Lindgren

Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

We construct demographic models of retirement and death in office of U.S. Supreme Court justices, a group that has gained demographic notice, evaded demographic analysis, and is said to diverge from expected retirement patterns. Models build on prior multistate labor force status studies, and data permit an unusually clear distinction between voluntary and “induced” retirement. Using data on every justice from 1789 through 2006, with robust, cluster-corrected, discrete-time, censored, event-history methods, we (1) estimate retirement effects of pension eligibility, age, health, and tenure on the timing of justices’ retirements and deaths in office, (2) resolve decades of debate over the politicized departure hypothesis that justices tend to alter the timing of their retirements for the political benefit or detriment of the incumbent president, (3) reconsider the nature of rationality in retirement decisions, and (4) consider the relevance of organizational conditions as well as personal circumstances to retirement decisions. Methodological issues are addressed.

Blackmail: An Afterword

The struggle to understand blackmail is a struggle for the soul of the criminal law. Is the criminal law efficiency-based or moralitybased? Is it based on harm or exploitation? What constitutes coercion? All these problems are explored in this Symposium on blackmail. I believe that the ultimate contribution of these papers will reach far beyond the confines of blackmail. They represent a significant step on the road toward understanding coercion in a broader sense than that which prevails in the philosophical literature, and toward seeing exploitation as a principle competing with harm as a basis for the criminal law.

Discussion: Anticipating Problems—Doing Social Science Research In The Shadow of The Law

As a social science researcher, should you promise full confidentiality to the people that you are studying? If the government or a private plaintiff wants your research notes or records, will you be put to the choice of either breaking your confidences or going to jail? In their provocative article, Anticipating Law, Ted Palys and John Lowman suggest that those researchers who design their projects so as to maximize the need for confidences and who actually make stronger promises of confidentiality may be able to give both their participants and themselves more legal protection. This strategic use of the law is both the papers strength and its primary danger. While many (if not most) researchers blithely promise their participants absolute confidentiality, the more sophisticated among them have been promising much less. During my own Ph.D. training at the University of Chicago, Professor Norman Bradbum, who was also the Research Director of the National Opinion Research Center, instructed his graduate students not to promise any more than you can deliver. He recommended promising to keep information confidential only to the extent that the law allows.