Making inferences about jury behavior from jury verdict statistics

The jury research that appears to have had the most impact on judges, policymakers, and legal academics concerned with the civil justice system involves studies using data on jury verdict statistics. This article sets forth the serious methodological problems with such studies and documents the fact that, for many purposes, the conclusions that authors have drawn from them are scientifically invalid because plausible rival alternative hypptheses cannot be eliminated. The article concludes with cautions about the seductive appeal of jury verdict data and the need to clearly recognize and state their limitations.Professors George Christie, Samuel Gross, Valerie Hans, Richard Lempert, James Levine, Michael Saks, Joseph Sanders, and Clive Seligman made many helpful comments on this article, and so did my research assistants: Jessica Buranosky Lee, Elaina Cohen, and David Landau. I also want to gratefully acknowledge an intellectual debt of over three decades to Professor Joseph E. McGrath, who scribbled about research designs and the meaning of data, and to Professor Lloyd G. Humphreys, who first introduced me to problems of measurement.     

Industry Self-Regulation: An Institutional Perspective

Throughout the advanced countries of the world self-regulatory regimes are being introduced. This article suggests that, at least in some contexts, industry self-regulation can be an effective and efficient means of social control that has been largely ignored by economics (which has a focus on individual rather than group behavior) and prematurely discounted by mainstream regulatory theory. The article examines the strengths and to a lesser extent the weaknesses of industry self-regulation from five closely related yet distinct vantage points: mediating institutions; industrial morality; institutionalizing responsibility; institutions responding to external pressure; and the roles of the state and third parties.     

Security and development in the Caucasus

This article discusses the linkage between security and development in the Caucasus. In particular, it examines the degree to which developmental dysfunction has been a significant cause of conflict, the extent to which conflict has distorted the region's economic transition, and the role of development assistance in fostering conflict resolution. The article argues that the region's conflicts have had locally significant economic consequences and that they make it difficult for the region's states to cushion the effects of post‐communist economic transition. However, the collapse of command economies and the failure of governance have a stronger causal role in explaining the economic collapse and the halting quality of economic recovery. Turning to the role of development assistance in conflict resolution, aid agencies and donors have been reluctant to use development assistance as an instrument of conflict resolution. However, there has been some success in using micro‐level assistance to foster reconciliation between communities.