THE MODERN TASK OF JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION IN NEW SOUTH WALES*

The purpose of this address will be to argue that the task of judicial administration in New South Wales is qualitatively different at the present time from what it has been in the past and special thought and attention and special administrative machinery are required to cope with it. Since the Second World War the business of the courts has been growing, as have judicial numbers, but until recent times the growth has been coped with by relying on established administrative machinery and techniques. The problem was regarded as a quantitative one to be handled by increased staff in the registries, more judges, more courtrooms and so on. But today the scope of the problem demands much more imaginative solutions. It is really different in kind from previous problems in the judicial field.     

THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF THE REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY DESIGN: A META‐ANALYSIS OF 15 WITHIN‐STUDY COMPARISONS

Theory predicts that regression discontinuity (RD) provides valid causal inference at the cutoff score that determines treatment assignment. One purpose of this paper is to test RD's internal validity across 15 studies. Each of them assesses the correspondence between causal estimates from an RD study and a randomized control trial (RCT) when the estimates are made at the same cutoff point where they should not differ asymptotically. However, statistical error, imperfect design implementation, and a plethora of different possible analysis options, mean that they might nonetheless differ. We test whether they do, assuming that the bias potential is greater with RDs than RCTs. A second purpose of this paper is to investigate the external validity of RD by exploring how the size of the bias estimates varies across the 15 studies, for they differ in their settings, interventions, analyses, and implementation details. Both Bayesian and frequentist meta‐analysis methods show that the RD bias is below 0.01 standard deviations on average, indicating RD's high internal validity. When the study‐specific estimates are shrunken to capitalize on the information the other studies provide, all the RD causal estimates fall within 0.07 standard deviations of their RCT counterparts, now indicating high external validity. With unshrunken estimates, the mean RD bias is still essentially zero, but the distribution of RD bias estimates is less tight, especially with smaller samples and when parametric RD analyses are used.     

THEORIES OF REGULATORY IMPACT: THE ROLES OF THE REGULATOR, THE REGULATED, AND THE PUBLIC

Berry reviews the major theories for why legislative intent differs from regulatory output including: (1) theories of commission inadequacy, (2) group theories of political science, and (3) group theories of regulation offered by economists. He reviews the salient literature in each type and concludes that none alone incorporates a sufficient explanation for the wide range of regulatory outcomes. Such an explanation, he maintains, requires an analysis of all three actors, and of the variation in the incentives, resources, and goals of each.