Deep IV in Law

Appellate Decisions and Texts Impact Sentencing in Trial Courts

Xinyue Zhang author Zhe Huang author Ruofan Wang author Daniel L Chen author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:25th Aug '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Deep IV in Law cover

This Element analyses real-world trial courts data with state-of-the-art machine learning and causal inference methods.

This Element explores the use of high-dimensional instrumental variables to estimate the influence between US Circuit Courts' decisions on criminal appeals and sentence lengths imposed by US District Courts.Do US Circuit Courts' decisions on criminal appeals influence sentence lengths imposed by US District Courts? This Element explores the use of high-dimensional instrumental variables to estimate this causal relationship. Using judge characteristics as instruments, this Element implements two-stage models on court sentencing data for the years 1991 through 2013. This Element finds that Democratic, Jewish judges tend to favor criminal defendants, while Catholic judges tend to rule against them. This Element also finds from experiments that prosecutors backlash to Circuit Court rulings while District Court judges comply. Methodologically, this Element demonstrates the applicability of deep instrumental variables to legal data.

ISBN: 9781009296373

Dimensions: 228mm x 151mm x 4mm

Weight: 90g

75 pages