This study finds that contingent fees benefit plaintiffs and do not cause higher awards.

It has long since been established that children raised by single parents are more likely to become sexually active, commit illegal acts, and use illegal drugs at young ages. What has not been determined is whether or not there is a causal effect associated with the disintegration of the family....

Legal cases are won or lost on the basis of statistical discrimination measures, but workers’ perceptions of discriminatory behavior are important for understanding labor supply decisions. Workers who believe that they have been discriminated against are more likely to leave their employers,...

Targeting is the practice of inspecting firms most likely to violate a regulation. This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of targeting in regulatory compliance. I propose that self-reporting by a firm is used to demonstrate that firms are willing to cooperate. The results indicate...

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the U.S. jury system needs to be "fixed". Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show...

Although flat fees are common for divorces, wills and trusts, and probate, lawyers in personal injury cases generally are paid by contingency fee or at an hourly rate. Arguments have been made that contingency fees increase low-quality, "frivolous" litigation but counterarguments suggest that...

We argue that partisan elected judges have an incentive to redistribute wealth from out-of-state defendants (nonvoters) to in-state plaintiffs (voters). We first test the hypothesis by using cross-state data. We find a significant partisan effect after controlling for differences in injuries,...

Judges facing exogenous constraints on their pecuniary income have an incentive to reduce their workload to increase their private welfare. In the face of an increase in caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases more rapidly. In class action cases, failing to...

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. The average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black county poverty rate of 1...