I had the good fortune of attending the CELS 2015 in St. Louis, MO last week (Oct. 29-31). This was for my PhD research, not for the OCLA. However, as the research presented at the conference is of interest to the OCLA, below I list a few highlights from the conference:
Data for all criminal cases in Russia
- Russian researchers at the Institute for the Rule of Law in St. Petersburg have been given access to detailed data about every criminal proceeding completed in Russia from 2009-2013, a total of 5 million cases. The researchers have found correlations between social status and sentence length (low status correlates with longer sentences) as well as correlations between sentence length and defendant characteristics such as sex, citizenship, and marital status. In their interpretation of their results, the researchers attempt to distinguish between which observations can be justified as having legal origins, and which cannot and must be considered to have extra-legal origins (bias). An example of the latter is the observation that college students appear to be consistently treated more leniently in criminal sentencing than non-students.
Ontario Small Claims Court
- Researchers at the University of Toronto have been given access to data pertaining to all claims filed in the Ontario Small Claims Court from 2006-2013. The data covers several years before and after the increase in cap amount for small claims lawsuits from $10,000 to $25,000, which occurred on January 1, 2010. The researchers’ analysis suggests that rather than increasing access to justice for the poorest plaintiffs, the cap increase resulted in a reduction in the number of claims filed by the lowest income plaintiffs and an increase in the number of claims filed by higher income plaintiffs. The court does not store the data on case outcomes. Under the contract they signed with the Ministry, the researchers are not permitted to share any of the data they were given.
Judicial recusal experiment
- A group of researchers from several US universities are conducting an experiment regarding the relationship between lawyers’ campaign donations and judicial recusal. The researchers find lawsuits in which at least one of the lawyers has donated to the judge’s campaign, then send one (“treatment”) sub-group of those judges a letter informing them of the conflict and asking them to recuse themselves. The other (“control”) sub-group is not sent a letter, in order to evaluate the effect that sending the letter has on whether judges recuse themselves or not. The researchers only send letters in cases that are at the very early stages, for reasons related to the approval of their project by an ethical review board. So far, the researchers have observed some (very) preliminary suggestions that judges who receive the treatment letter may be more inclined to disclose the funding relationship, but not more inclined to recuse themselves from the lawsuit.
The program from the conference is here.
