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Affiliated Faculty

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Center for the Study of Law, Politics and Economics


Calendar of Events 2009-2010

FALL 2010		James Cavallaro January 25, 2010, 12:00-1:30 PM Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 Title: TBA
		Dan Brinks January 25, 2010, 12:00-1:30 PM Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 Title: TBA
		Dan Kahan April 7 , 2010, 12:00-1:30 PM Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 Talk: TBA
		Justin Fox March 18, 2010, 12:00-1:30 PM Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 Talk: TBA
		Noel Maurer April 21, 2010, 12:00-1:30 PM Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 Talk: TBA

SUMMER 2009		Conference: Modeling Legal Rules July 19-21, 2009 Location: Emory Law School, Room G575 DESCRIPTION: How do collegial courts make law? This question is central to the study of judicial politics. Traditional models of collegial court decision-making treat courts as legislatures; they assume courts pick a policy outcome in a one dimensional policy space. However, we know that courts actually make decisions very differently from legislatures. Judges simultaneously decide on case disposition, state a rule that justifies the disposition and indicates how future cases should be decided, and possibly write concurrences that flesh out individual positions when they deviate from the stated rule. This conference is designed to bring together a small group of foremost scholars actively involved in the study of collegial court decision-making in an effort to help push forward our understanding of how collegial courts actually make decisions and what the consequences are for our understanding of courts in a political system.

Calendar of Events 2008-2009

SPRING 2009		Jeff Lax (email) February 5 Location: Fifth Floor of the Law School Talk: "Doctrinal Choice in the Judicial Hierarchy"
		Michael Bailey (email) February 24 Location: Fifth Floor of the Law School Talk: "Constrained or not? A new test of separation of powers theories of Supreme Court behavior"
		Workshop on Law, Politics and Human Rights March 20-21 Location: North Decatur Building: Room 155 (March 20) Candler Library: Room 114 (March 21) Click here for Workshop Schedule Summary: This workshop is designed to promote and help develop research on a few core political questions, which transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Why do states adopt legal obligations that limit their authority over human rights, and then delegate the enforcement of these obligations to domestic and/or international judicial bodies? Under what conditions will states comply with these obligations? More specifically, under what conditions will the courts to which enforcement power has been delegated come to constitute genuine constraints on state behavior? Getting the right answers to these questions is critical for designing good international institutions, for knowing what kinds of domestic reforms should be supported, and for setting our expectations appropriately about what can be accomplished by international advocacy and foreign aid. The substantive goal of the workshop is to summarize, through our collective research, what each of our subfields has to say about these questions. In particular, we wish to know whether there are results or methodological strategies in one field that can help address a research problem in another. We would like to ask whether existing data is sufficient to test our theoretical claims, and if not, how might we go about collecting what we need. And, of course, we wish to discover new questions that have emerged in our respective projects. Beyond substance, we want to provide a comfortable setting within which people can present their work and receive feedback from a community of scholars analyzing related problems. Speakers: Adeno Addis - Tulane University School of Law Javier Couso - Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile David Fontana - George Washington University Law School Darren Hawkins - BYU Laurence Helfer - Vanderbilt School of Law Leslie Johns - UCLA Linda Keith - University of Texas, Dallas Jeffrey Lax - Columbia University Will Moore - Florida State University Emilia Powell - Georgia Southern/University of Alabama Julio Rios-Figuerora - CIDE, Mexico City Beth Simmons - Harvard University Mary Volcansek - Texas Christian University Emory Speakers: Brendan Korht - Medicine David Davis & Amanda Murdie - Political Science Emily Ritter - Political Science Jeffrey Staton - Political Science Clifford Carrubba - Political Science
		Jenna Bednar (email) April 6 Location: Fifth Floor of the Law School Talk: Behavioral Spillovers in Multiple Games: An Experimental Study
FALL 2008		Tom Clark (email) September 23 (12:00PM) Location: Fifth Floor of the Law School Talk: "Judicial Independence and Nonpartisan Elections"
		Daniel Rodriguez (email) November 4 Location: Fifth Floor of the Law School Talk: TBA

SPRING 2008		Conference: Textual Analysis and the Study of Judicial Behavior February 21–23 DESCRIPTION: At its most fundamental, the study of judicial behavior is the study of the making of law. In making law, judges generally do two things, resolve a particular conflict, and make a statement over the future application of law. Most quantitative work to date has focused on the disposition of the case at hand. The reason is simple; it is far easier to identify who wins a case than to boil down often-lengthy opinions into a set of measurable outputs. Computational linguistics provides a potential solution to this problem. While some practitioners have started using basic textual analysis tools, such as Word Scores, to code texts, the potential for these tools to revolutionize the study of law is relatively untapped. This conference is a first attempt to bring together social scientists, lawyers, and computational linguists in an effort to fill this lacuna.

FALL 2007		Thomas Ulen November 13 Faculty Library, Emory Law School Talk: TBA
		Matthew Stephenson September 25 Hunter Auditorium, Emory Law School "Optimal Political Control of the Bureaucracy"
		Jeffrey Staton October 16 Hunter Auditorium, Emory Law School Talk: TBA