Understanding the Costs of Litigation: The Case of the Hourly-Fee Lawyer

What does it mean to talk about the “cost of civil justice”? What can be done to bring down that cost? This article addresses these two important questions. Drawing on data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project, the authors first examine the components of cost and then present an extensive analysis of what is by far the dominant element of the cost equation-legal services. The analysis of the cost of legal services examines the amount of time lawyers devote to cases and the rates they charge for their time. The major factors influencing time include adversariness, stakes, litigant goals, and court (federal versus state); hourly rates appear to be determined primarily by the legal services market. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of the results of the analysis for reforms of the civil justice system that might seek to lower the cost of justice.     

Duplications of the Y-chromosome specific loci P25 and 92R7 and forensic implications

In the present study, we demonstrate that two commonly used Y-chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), P25 and 92R7, are paralogous sequence variants (PSVs) originating from segmental duplications and that at least one of the sequence variants in each group of loci is polymorphic. Several methodologies were used in order to detect the SNP alleles and the PSVs of the loci. All results obtained with the various typing techniques supported the conclusion. The allele distributions of the binary markers were analysed in more than 600 males with seven different haplogroups. For P25, the ancestral allele C was found in several samples from different haplogroups. The derived allele A was always present with an additional C variant. Haplogroup P was defined by the derived allele A at the 92R7 locus. However, the ancestral allele G was always associated with an A variant due to the duplication.     

An interactive model of attitude and risk/benefit formation regarding social issues

Decision analysis has become an increasingly useful tool for aiding decisionmakers in dealing with complex public and private sector decisions involving multiple objectives and uncertainty. An outgrowth of this discipline is Risk Assessment, which in part concerns how citizen attitudes, risks, and benefits regarding social issues evolve. It is hypothesized that such attitudes and beliefs are determined interactively. A general simultaneous equation model is developed consistent with this hypothesis. A hybrid estimation model and the technique of ridge regression combined with two stage least squares are developed to estimate the model's parameters and tested using data from a psychometric survey of citizen attitudes and beliefs regarding contemporary socially sensitive issues. The results verify the validity of the model and technique. The utility of this model for the policy making process as well as future theoretical and applied research are discussed.