Precedent Externality, Network Effect, and the Possible Inefficiency of the Evolution of Laws

Using the traditional scenario of tort conflict as an example, I argue that the marginal precautionary costs of injurers and victims are not constant, as was assumed by most previous researchers. The precedent of a liability rule has some natural externality on the precaution technology, and hence marginal cost, faced by future agents involved in torts. The adoption of legal rules therefore has a network effect, meaning that the present prevalent adoption of one rule increases the probability of its future adoption. Treating the dynamic evolution of legal rules as a random process, we are able to apply an established result in the literature of network economies to conclude the path-dependence, non-predictability, and potential inefficiency concerning the final legal rule to which the dynamics converge.     

Does Regression Produce Representative Estimates of Causal Effects?

With an unrepresentative sample, the estimate of a causal effect may fail to characterize how effects operate in the population of interest. What is less well understood is that conventional estimation practices for observational studies may produce the same problem even with a representative sample. Causal effects estimated via multiple regression differentially weight each unit's contribution. The “effective sample” that regression uses to generate the estimate may bear little resemblance to the population of interest, and the results may be nonrepresentative in a manner similar to what quasi‐experimental methods or experiments with convenience samples produce. There is no general external validity basis for preferring multiple regression on representative samples over quasi‐experimental or experimental methods. We show how to estimate the “multiple regression weights” that allow one to study the effective sample. We discuss alternative approaches that, under certain conditions, recover representative average causal effects. The requisite conditions cannot always be met.     

Rethinking Gender and Humour in Nineteenth-Century Iran

This article examines two nineteenth-century Persian texts with significant implications for debates about gender relationships in Iran. Informed by a methodology associated with Quentin Skinner, the article questions some far-reaching conclusions made about these texts in previous studies, demonstrating the value of making methodologically transparent approaches to the study of historical texts. Versions of this methodology have been employed to present innovative interpretations of writings by such Western authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. However, the application of this interpretive approach to non-Western texts has been quite limited. I provide evidence of this methodology’s ability to improve our understanding of non-Western texts, particularly when they present hermeneutically rooted polemics. By reinterpreting the texts it examines, the article helps us to develop a better appreciation for the roots of modern Persian gender relations.     

Traditions of protest and the high‐school student movements in Spain and France in 1986–87

This article explores the social circumstances that nurture social movements in advanced capitalist societies by examining the Spanish and French high‐school student movements of 1986–87. Attention is given to the influence of unemployment, outside organisers, the political education of community leaders, and past protests that provided examples for movement participants. The article proposes that future research on European social movements focus, first, on organisational prerequisites, and, second, on the social and psychological processes by which people derive lessons from past political events.     

In the Interests of Clients or Commerce? Legal Aid,Supply, Demand,and ‘Ethical Indeterminacy’ in Criminal Defence Work

As a professional, a lawyer's first duty is to serve the client's best interests, before simple monetary gain. In criminal defence work, this duty has been questioned in the debate about the causes of growth in legal aid spending: is it driven by lawyers (suppliers) inducing unnecessary demand for their services or are they merely responding to increased demand? Research reported here found clear evidence of a change in the handling of cases in response to new payment structures, though in ways unexpected by the policy's proponents. The paper develops the concept of ‘ethical indeterminacy’ as a way of understanding how defence lawyers seek to reconcile the interests of commerce and clients. Ethical indeterminacy suggests that where different courses of action could each be said to benefit the client, the lawyer will tend to advise the client to decide in the lawyer's own interests. Ethical indeterminacy is mediated by a range of competing conceptions of ‘quality’ and ‘need’. The paper goes on to question the very distinction between ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ in the provision of legal services.     

Incentives, criminal defence lawyers and plea bargaining

Plea bargaining has become a central feature of criminal procedure in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. This paper explores an area seldom discussed in the economic literature on plea bargaining: the influence of the defence lawyer's fee contract on the terms of the bargain. In particular, it uses data from one jurisdiction of the impact on case trajectories of changes in publicly funded defence lawyers’ contracts to test the proposition that the nature of the lawyer's contract influences how cases are managed. An event study methodology on a pooled time-series cross-section data set of case trajectories before and after the change in the nature of the contract is used to examine whether the new payment regime significantly changed the trajectories of cases through the summary criminal justice system. Overall the results seem to suggest that the behaviour of defence lawyers may be influenced by financial incentives. This implies that the terms of plea bargains reached between prosecution and defence lawyers may be affected by the defence lawyer's remuneration contract. Consequently, the authors conclude that the role of defence lawyers has been under-researched in the literature on the economics of plea bargaining.