Institute for Advanced Study
Toulouse School of Economics
Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
NYU Center for Data Science Lead PI, AMICUS (Analytical Metrics for Informed Courtroom Understanding and Strategy)
oTree Open Source Research Foundation
2023-2024 presentations: Duke, UT Austin, Rice, Minnesota, University of Chicago, Northwestern, University of Michigan, Washington University, Georgetown, NYU, Chicago Federal Reserve, Stanford, Munich, Konstanz, Lausanne, Toulouse, Harvard, Boston University, MIT, UCSD, UCLA, Claremont McKenna, University of Maryland, Brookings Institute, Advances in Field Experiments, Canadian Law and Economics, Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (Plenary), Economic Science Association, Law and Macroeconomics, NEUDC
Streamed presentations:
2023 International Student Week Keynote, Slides
2023 Stanford Center for Rule of Law, Slides
2023 Association of French, Italian and German Administrative Judges, Slides
2023 Experimental Jurisprudence, Slides
2023 IAST-OxPo Political Science & Political Economy, Slides
2023 American Law and Economics Association, Slides
2023 Association of American Law Schools Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice, Slides
2023 Open Door Legal, Slides
2022 Asia Law and Economics Association Keynote
2022 NBER Development
2022 Stanford Hoover Text as Data
2022 Harvard Development Network
2022 NBER SI IT and Digitization
2022 Can AI Be Ethical?
2021 Judiciary of Colombia
2020 International Conference on Computational Social Science Keynote
2020 World Bank DE JURE, Brief
2018 European Law and Economics Association Keynote, Slides
2017 Institutional and Organizational Economics Academy, Slides
2014 Homo Oeconomicus Versus Homo Socialis Zurich
2013 Inaugural Lecture ETH Zurich
Law and economics is divided between the consequentialist view that optimal policy should be based on calculations of costs and benefits and a non-consequentialist view that policy should be determined deontologically: from duties we derive what is the correct law–what is right and just.
Are there deontological motivations, and if there are, how might we formally model these motivations? What are the implications of things like deontological motivations for economics methods and policy, and what puzzles can we explain with deontological motivations that we cannot with standard models? What is the impact of law & economics on justice?
To answer these questions, his research has
Some current themes on consequences, formation, and measurement of normative commitments (and applications in law) include:
His research has been accepted in leading economics journals (American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics), science journals (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Nature Human Behavior), double-blind peer-review law outlets (Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum and Law and STEM Junior Faculty Forum), 5 NeurIPS selections (Machine Learning and Law, Interpretable Machine Learning, CausalML, ML for Economic Policy, and AI for Credible Elections), and press outlets (Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Times of India) and has been referenced in 2 National Academy of Sciences Study Reports (Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012) and Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19 (2020)).
The research has anchored successful applications with € 10 350 000 in grant budget awarded for “Origins and Effects of Normative Commitments”, “Positive Foundations of Normative Commitments”, “Digital Humanities: Legal Analysis in a Big Data World”, “The Impact of Justice Innovations on Poverty, Growth, and Development”, "Data AI and IE", "Green and Digital Development", “High-Dimensional Econometrics Applications in Law and Economics”, “Markets and Morality: Do Free Markets Corrode Moral Values?”, and "oTree: An Open-Source Platform for Online, Lab, and Field Experiments".
He was Coordinating PI for a € 13 300 000 European Research Council Synergy grant proposal "Difference-in-Indifference: Normative Commitments in Multiculturalist Societies" that advanced to the second stage in 2018 and Lead PI for a € 3 600 000 European Research Council Advanced grant proposal "E-Justice Innovations in the Wake of COVID-19" that advanced to the second stage in 2022.
His research has also received support from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, European Union, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, DFID, Google Inclusion, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, International Growth Centre, Knowledge for Trust Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Templeton Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation.
He serves or has served on the Program Committees of NAACL Natural Legal Language Processing, International Conference on AI and Law, Econometric Society Meetings, European Economic Association, American Law and Economics Association, and European Law and Economics Association, and been invited to deliver keynotes at the European Law and Economics Association, Asia Law and Economics Association, French Law and Economics Association, International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), AI, law, and behavioral science conferences, and the 2018 Heremans Lectures in Law & Economics.AMICUS (Analytical Metrics for Informed Courtroom Understanding and Strategy)/DE JURE (Data and Evidence for Justice Reform)’s aim is to revolutionize how legitimacy and equality in justice systems are measured, understood, and enhanced. The goal is to move from studying historical data to working with administrative data, machine learning, and RCTs to achieve a more just system. The program has thus far worked with countries in three broad categories. In the first group, AMICUS works closely with court management, judiciaries, and training academies to design, deploy, and evaluate interventions—often developing the technologies to do so. In the second group, AMICUS works with auxiliary actors involved in access to justice to assess trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and trust in the law. In the third group, AMICUS obtains data and conducts historical analyses on judicial efficiency or inconsistencies that may spur a cycle of change.
Markets and Morality: How Markets Shape Our Dis(Regard) for Others
Who Cares? Measuring Attitude Strength in a Polarized Environment
The Disavowal of Decisionism in American Law: Political Motivation in the Judiciary
Mapping the Geometry of Law using Document Embeddings
Gender Attitudes in the Judiciary: Evidence from U.S. Circuit Courts
Invariance of Equilibrium to the Strategy Method I: Theory
Invariance of Equilibrium to the Strategy Method II: Experimental Evidence
Non-Confrontational Extremists
Do Markets Overcome Repugnance? Muslim Trade Response to Anti-Muhammad Cartoons
Ramadan Fasting Increases Leniency in Judges from Pakistan and India
Clash of Norms: Judicial Leniency on Defendant Birthdays
Judicial Compliance in District Courts
Motivational Drivers for Serial Position Effects in High-Stakes Legal Decisions
Social Preferences or Sacred Values? Theory and Evidence of Deontological Motivations
Measuring Judicial Sentiment: Methods and Application to U.S. Circuit Courts
COVID-19 Within Families Amplifies the Prosociality Gap Between Adolescents of High and Low Socioeconomic Status
Carceral-Community Epidemiology, Structural Racism, and Covid-19 Disparities
Association of Jail Decarceration and Anti-Contagion Policies with Covid-19 Case Growth Rates in United States Counties
Incarceration And Its Disseminations: COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons From Chicago’s Cook County Jail
Automated Fact-Value Distinction in Court Opinions
Gender Violence and the Price of Virginity: Theory and Evidence of Incomplete Marriage Contracts
Judicial Analytics and the Great Transformation of American Law
Mandatory Disclosure: Theory and Evidence from Industry-Physician Relationships
Law and Literature: Theory and Evidence on Empathy and Guile
Electoral Cycles Among U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges
The Shareholder Wealth Effects of Delaware Litigation
Decision-Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy: Evidence From Asylum Courts, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires
oTree: An Open Source Platform for Online, Lab, and Field Experiments
Perceived Masculinity Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Outcomes
Are Online Labor Markets Spot Markets for Tasks? A Field Experiment on the Behavioral Response to Wages Cuts
Can Markets Stimulate Rights? On the Alienability of Legal Claims
The Construction of Morals
Sparse Models and Methods for Optimal Instruments with an Application to Eminent Domain
Can Countries Reverse Fertility Decline? Evidence from France's Marriage and Baby Bonuses, 1929-1981
Club Goods and Group Identity: Evidence from Islamic Resurgence During the Indonesian Financial Crisis
Income Distribution Dynamics with Endogenous Fertility
Civicbase: An Open-Source Platform for Deploying Quadratic Voting for Survey Research NeurIPS21
In-group Bias in the Indian Judiciary: Evidence from 5.5 million Criminal Cases
Analysis of Vocal Implicit Bias in SCOTUS Decisions Through Predictive Modeling
Non-Segmental Conditioning of Sibilant Variation in American English
The Genealogy of Ideology: Identifying Persuasive Memes and Predicting Agreement in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Incarceration And Its Disseminations: COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons From Chicago’s Cook County Jail - A Response to Pierson et al.
The Promise of Machine Learning for the Courts of India
A Better Way to Onboard AI
A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Understanding Survey Response: Likert vs. Quadratic Voting for Attitudinal Research
Automated Classification of Modes of Moral Reasoning in Judicial Decisions
What Kind of Judge is Brett Kavanaugh? A Quantitative Analysis
Economics, Religion, and Culture: A Brief Introduction
A Market for Justice: A First Empirical Look at Third-Party Litigation Funding
Distinguishing Between Custom and Law: Empirical Examples of Endogeneity from Property and First Amendment Precedents
Sonia Sotomayor and the Construction of Merit
Does Disclosure Matter? Comment
Trading Off Reproductive Technology and Adoption: A Response to Appleton and Pollak
Trading Off Reproductive Technology and Adoption: Do IVF Subsidies Decrease Adoption Rates and Should It Matter? Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum
Income-Distribution Dynamics with Endogenous Fertility
Revolutionizing Judicial Efficiency in India: The Role of AI and ML in Enhancing the eCourts Experience
Using Data and Technology to Improve Court Performance and to Strengthen Alternative Dispute Resolution
Government Analytics Using Machine Learning
Digitalization of Justice: The Impact of Judicial Speed on Firm Outcomes in Croatia
Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC) Program
Machine Learning and Rule of Law
Case Vectors: Spatial Representations of the Law Using Document Embeddings
Attorney Voice and the U.S. Supreme Court
Intermediated Social Preferences: Altruism in an Algorithmic Era
Tastes for Desert and Placation: A Reference Point-Dependent Model of Social Preferences
Does Appellate Precedent Matter? Stock Price Responses to Appellate Court Decisions of FCC Actions
Islamic Resurgence and Social Violence During the Indonesian Financial Crisis
A Decade of POCSO Developments, Challenges and Insights from Judicial Data
Deep IV in Law: Appellate Decisions and Texts Impact Sentencing in Trial Courts NeurIPS19
Incremental AI
Transforming Justice in the Middle East and North Africa through Data
Religion, Welfare Politics, and Church-State Separation
L'odyssée de l'intelligence artificielle
A Decade Later, POSCO Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Had an Impact
A Judge Retires. Just How Political Is That Decision?
Releasing Nonviolent Accused Makes Us Safer in Covid Era
Kavanaugh is radically conservative. Here's the data to prove it
Transmitting Rights
Can Policies Affect Preferences? Theory and Evidence from Random Variation in Abortion Jurisprudence
Altruism in Governance:
Insights from Randomized Training for Pakistan's Junior Ministers
The Judicial Superego: Implicit Egoism, Internalized Racism, and Prejudice in Three Million Sentencing Decisions
Priming Ideology I: How Presidential Elections Affect U.S. Judges
Priming Ideology II: Presidential Elections Increasingly Affect U.S. Judges
In-Group Bias in the Indian Judiciary: Evidence from 5 Million Criminal Cases
Is Ambiguity Aversion a Preference? Ambiguity Aversion without Asymmetric Information
Grit and Academic Resilience During Covid-19
Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice
Shaping Societal Norms: Experimental Evidence on the Normative Impacts of Free Speech Law
The Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty? Evidence from British Commutations During World War I
Covering: Mutable Characteristics and Perceptions of Voice in the U.S. Supreme Court
Unraveling and Judge Productivity in the Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks: Evidence and A Novel Proposal
The Role of Justice in Development: The Data Revolution
Data Science for Justice: Evidence from a Nationwide Randomized Experiment in Kenya
What Role Does Access to Civil Justice Play in Reducing Homelessness?
Impact of Free Legal Search on Rule of Law: Evidence from Indian Kanoon
Building Courts: Effects on Access to Justice and Economic Development
Information Provision and Court Performance: Experimental Evidence from Chile
Training Policymakers in Econometrics
AI Education as State Capacity: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan
Mostly Harmless Machine Learning: Learning Optimal Instruments in Linear IV Models NeurIPS20
Insiders, Outsiders, and Involuntary Unemployment: Sexual Harassment Exacerbates Gender Inequality
Growth Under the Shadow of Expropriation? The Economics Impacts of Eminent Domain
How Do Rights Revolutions Occur? Free Speech and the First Amendment
Environmental Litigation as Scrutiny: A Four Decade Analysis of Justice, Firms, and Pollution in India
The Political Economy of Beliefs: Why Fiscal and Social Conservatives/Liberals Come Hand-in-Hand
The Prejudices of Economic Ideology: The Exacerbation of Racial and Gender Inequalities by Economics Training for Judges, A Natural Experiment
The Relativity of Racial Perception: Color Contrast Effects in Refugee Courts
E. Reinhart
How Prosecutors Exacerbate Racial Disparities
E. Reinhart
The Legal Reproduction of Racism: Determinants of Sentencing Disparities
E. Reinhart
Motivated Reasoning in the Field: Polarization of Precedent, Prose, and Policy in U.S. Circuit Courts, 1930-2013
Re-Examining Juicial Bias
Prejudice in Practice
Caste aside? Names, Networks and Justice in the courts of Bihar, India
Mood and the Malleability of Moral Reasoning: The Impact of Irrelevant Factors on Judicial Decision Making
Homophily and Transmission of Behavioral Traits in Networks
Why Are Rights Revolutions Rare?
Inside the Mind of Inmates: An Empirical Study of Inmates’ Perceptions, Attitudes, and Behavior
Role Models and Theory of Mind: Teacher Vaccinations and Student Success
The Strategic Display of Facial Expressions
Attitudes as Assets
Willingness To Say? Optimal Survey Design for Prediction
Legitimizing Policy
Contract Enforcement in a Stateless Economy
Addiction and Illegal Markets
Courts and Informality Across Countries
Testing Axiomatizations of Ambiguity Aversion
Reward-on-the-Line Offline Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Agents
Automated Legal Information Retrieval and Summarization
Does Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR) Improve Policymaking and Decision Outcomes?
The Impact of Online Dispute Resolution on Judicial Outcomes in India
Algorithms as Prosecutors: Lowering Rearrest Rates Without Disparate Impacts and Identifying Defendant Characteristics ‘Noisy’ to Human Decision-Makers Law and STEM Junior Faculty Forum NeurIPS17
Judicial Inattention: Machine Prediction of Appeal Success in U.S. Asylum Courts
Machine Learning and Deterrence
Mimicry: Phonetic Accommodation Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Votes
Religious Freedoms, Church-State Separation, and Religiosity: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges
Is Justice Really Blind? And Is It Also Deaf?
M. Kumar
Using Machine Learning to Detect Human Rights Abuses