The recent collapse and bankruptcy of Dewey & LeBoef has raised questions about the long-term viability of the current "BigLaw" model for legal services delivery, as well as more specific issues about firms' hiring practices, degree of leverage, and the broader value (and wisdom) of buying legal talent. Firms often seek out established partners with the goal of securing market share, and/or to extend their geographic or substantive reach. Conversely, the sudden departure of significant numbers of partners is often viewed as a warning sign about a firm's continued viability. We analyze the determinants of law firm profitability, with particular attention to the question of lateral partners. We show that, after controlling for both firm-level unit effects and a host of other factors related to firm success and profitability, both influxes and egresses of lateral partners are unrelated to nearly all of measures of firm performance. Our results call into question the value of firms' investing substantial resources in lateral partner acquisition, and also raises questions about the reliability of partner departures as an "early warning sign" of impending firm collapse.
Event history models have become a dominant method of analysis in the study of international relations. Conventional event history models, however, retain the assumption that the effects of the covariates remain proportional to each other throughout the duration of the subject's phase. Nonproportional hazard (NPH) models are used, which allow for the effects of covariates to vary over time. These models are then applied to three previously established data sets on the duration of postwar peace, civil wars, and alliances. Results show that NPH analysis is a useful method for testing new hypotheses, as well as removing possible sources of bias from existing analyses.
Agenda setting has received only modest attention in studies of the judiciary. This reflects the limited control most courts exercise over the cases they hear. We analyze the influence of ideological and legal factors on the grant of en banc rehearing in the U.S. Courts of Appeals—one of the few instances of agenda control in the lower federal courts. Unlike previous research, we examine multiple decision points in the agenda-setting process. Our results indicate that the influence of attitudinal and legal factors varies across decision points revealing a complexity obscured in previous work. Our research underscores the importance of treating agenda setting as a process rather than as a single decision.
Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of ``minimally-supervised'' approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in U.S. federal appellate court decisions.
Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball’s designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio–demographic determinants of public opinion toward the DH rule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during September 1997. Our findings suggest that it is in fact Democrats, not Republicans, who tend to favor the DH. In addition, we find no effect for respondents’ proximity to American or National League teams, though older respondents were consistently more likely to oppose the rule.
After more than a decade of membership stability, the U.S. Supreme Court experienced a pair of vacancies following its 2004–2005 term. In July 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intention to retire. It is widely believed that her own health, that of her husband, and the favorable political environment influenced her decision to step down in January 2006. In the interim, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after struggling with ill health for many months, passed away on 3 September 2005, becoming the first sitting justice to die in more than five decades.
Theory: We argue that levels of concurrence and dissent on the U.S. Supreme Court are functions of norms. These norms arise from, and are influenced by, the behaviors of the individual justices, including the actions of the chief justices. In turn, they cause concurrences and dissents to fluctuate around a common level. Hypotheses: If consensual norms are a substantial influence on the behavior of the Court, the long-run extent of concurrence and dissent on the Court will covary substantially, and will do so to varying degrees under different chief justices. Methods: To test our hypotheses, we use cointegration and error-correction analyses of the number of Supreme Court cases from 1800 to 1991 with concurring and dissenting opinions. Because of the dramatic increase in concurrences and dissents during the 1940s, we make use of recently-developed methods for detecting cointegrating relationships in the presence of structural breaks. Results: Consistent with our expectations, dissents and concurrences move together over time; thus consensual norms appear to influence substantially both concurrences and dissents on the Court. The effects of such norms vary in the long term under different Chief Justices.
