Thomas J. Miles

Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from 'Secure Communities'

Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration—detention and deportation—has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.

Do Judges Make Regulatory Policy?: An Empirical Investigation of Chevron

In the last quarter-century, the Supreme Court has legitimated agency authority to interpret regulatory legislation, above all in Chevron U.S.A., Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc, the most-cited case in modern public law. Chevron recognizes that the resolution of statutory ambiguities often requires judgments of policy; its call for judicial deference to reasonable interpretations was widely expected to have eliminated the role of policy judgments in judicial review of agency interpretations of law. But this expectation has not been realized. On the Supreme Court, conservative justices vote to validate agency decisions less often than liberal justices. Moreover, the most conservative members of the Supreme Court show significantly increased validation of agency interpretations after President Bush succeeded President Clinton, and the least conservative members of the Court show significantly decreased validation rates in the same period. In a similar vein, the most conservative members of the Court are less likely to validate liberal agency interpretations than conservative ones and the least conservative members of the Court show the opposite pattern. Similar patterns can be found on federal appellate courts. In lower court decisions involving the EPA and the NLRB from 1990 to 2004, Republican appointees demonstrated a greater willingness to invalidate liberal agency decisions and those of Democratic administrations. These differences are greatly amplified when Republican appointees sit with two Republican appointees and when Democratic appointees sit with two Democratic appointees.

The teaching/research trade-off in law: data from the right tail.

Background: There is a long scholarly debate on the trade-off between research and teaching in various fields, but relatively little study of the phenomenon in law. This analysis examines the relationship between the two core academic activities at one particular school, the University of Chicago Law School, which is considered one of the most productive in legal academia. Method: We measure of scholarly productivity with the total number of publications by each professor for each year, and we approximate performance in teaching with course loads and average scores in student evaluations for each course. In OLS regressions, we estimate scholarly output as a function of teaching loads, faculty characteristics, and other controls. We also estimate teaching evaluation scores as a function of scholarly productivity, fixed effects for years and course subject, and faculty characteristics. Result: Net of other factors, we find that, under some specifications, research and teaching are positively correlated. In particular, we find that students’ perceptions of teaching quality rises, but at a decreasing rate, with the total amount of scholarship. We also find that certain personal characteristics correlate with productivity. Conclusion: The recent debate on the mission of American law schools has hinged on the assumption that a trade-off exists between teaching and research, and this article’s analysis, although limited in various ways, casts some doubt on that assumption.

Felon Disenfranchisement and Voter Turnout

Several states permanently disenfranchise convicted felons, and according to existing estimates, the population of disenfranchised felons is disproportionately male and African‐American. This paper examines the impact of felon disenfranchisement on state‐level voter turnout. First, the paper shows that the number of disenfranchised felons is so large that conventional measures of voter turnout, which fail to correct for the ineligibility of disenfranchised felons, significantly understate the participation rates of eligible African‐American men. Second, the paper uses a triple‐differences framework to test whether disenfranchisement actually reduces the turnout of African‐American men. The estimates reveal that disenfranchisement has no discernible effect on state‐level rates of voter turnout. The absence of an effect is consistent with the view that on average felons belong to demographic groups that, although eligible to vote, infrequently exercise that right. The estimates suggest that the impact and purpose of these laws are more modest than previously thought.

The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker Evidence From the World Series of Poker

In determining the legality of online poker—a multibillion dollar industry—courts have relied heavily on the issue of whether or not poker is a game of skill. Using newly available data, the authors analyze that question by examining the performance in the 2010 World Series of Poker of a group of poker players identified as being highly skilled prior to the start of the events. Those players identified a priori as being highly skilled achieved an average return on investment of over 30%, compared to a −15% for all other players. This large gap in returns is strong evidence in support of the idea that poker is a game of skill.

Empiricism and the Rising Incidence of Coauthorship in Law

The recent growth of empirical scholarship in law, which some have termed “empirical legal studies,” has received much attention. A less noticed implication of this trend is its potential impact on the manner of scholarly production in legal academia. A common prediction is that academic collaboration rises with scholarly specialization. As the complexity of a field grows, more and more diverse types of human capital are needed to make a contribution. This paper presents two tests of whether empiricism has spurred more co-authorship in law. First, the paper shows that the fraction of articles in the top fifteen law reviews that were empirical or co-authored (or both) trended upwards between 2000 and 2010. The increase in empirical articles accounted for a substantial share of the growth in co-authored articles, and the correlation between co-authorship and empiricism persisted after controlling for numerous other influences. Second, the paper examines the articles published since 1989 in two prominent, faculty-edited journals specializing in law & economics: the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization. Co-authored articles were far more common in these journals than in the general-interest, student-edited law reviews – a pattern which itself is consistent with the specialization hypothesis. The share of articles without empirical analysis or formal models in these journals plummeted over this period, while co-authorship rose sharply. These results support the view that specialization, and specifically the growth of empirical scholarship, has contributed to the trend of co-authorship in legal academia.

Estimating the Effect of America's Most Wanted: A Duration Analysis of Wanted Fugitives

Fugitives fleeing criminal prosecution and punishment are a major obstacle in the effort to fight crime, and conventional wisdom holds that publicity, such as the television program Americas Most Wanted, successfully locates wanted fugitives. This paper estimates a hazard model of fugitive flight using a sample of recently pursued fugitives and tests whether a fugitives appearance on the television program Americas Most Wanted hastens apprehension. The estimates show that broadcasting a fugitives profile on Americas Most Wanted substantially raises the apprehension hazard by a factor of seven and shortens the expected fugitive spell by roughly a fourth. The estimates also suggest that the television program provides a net social benefit. A fugitives demographic and offense characteristics also correlate with the apprehension hazard.

Racial Disparities in Wiretap Applications before Federal Judges

Federal investigators must obtain permission from two authorities before wiretapping suspects: first from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and then from a court. The DOJ imposes a higher standard on the use of wiretaps than courts do, and, as a result, all wiretap applications reaching federal judges are legally sufficient and receive judicial approval. In this setting, prosecutors have no incentive to seek review from favorable judges, and a judge’s identity should not correlate with the number of wiretap applications received. The paper tests this prediction using all wiretaps in federal criminal investigations during the years 1997–2007. Consistent with the prediction, judicial characteristics such as ideology and prior professional experience do not influence the number of wiretap applications a judge receives. But African American judges receive substantially fewer wiretap applications, even after numerous judicial and district characteristics are controlled for. The paper investigates several potential explanations for this disparity.

Do Attorney Surveys Measure Judicial Performance or Respondent Ideology? Evidence from Online Evaluations

Which judges are “good” at their jobs, and which are not? The answer may depend on the ideology of whom you ask. Judicial decisions inevitably involve policy making, and lawyers may prefer judges whose policy preferences match their own. This paper tests that prediction with online evaluations of judges. Criminal defense attorneys, a group likely to hold progressive views, make up a disproportionate share of the respondents. The respondents assign lower average scores to Republican appointees, especially female and minority ones, even after controlling for the judges’ backgrounds and performance measures. In comments, respondents object to judges with conservative tendencies more often than those with liberal ones. The objections to conservative tendencies correlate with large reductions in a judge’s numerical ratings, while objections to liberal ones do not. The results suggest that judicial evaluation surveys should take account of how attorneys’ ideology influences their perceptions of judicial performance.

Economics of Criminal Law

The volume presents the seminal articles in the economic analysis of the criminal law. The articles include the path-breaking theoretical economic analyses of criminal behavior and the leading empirical tests of these theories. The volume also contains the most prominent economic analyses of the substantive doctrines of criminal law and criminal procedure. Other articles present influential applications of economic concepts and evidence to perennial issues in criminal law and criminal justice, such as gun control, drug prohibition, and sentencing policy