Here are some past research projects unrelated to the book.
Misjudging a Reasonable Jury: Evidence that Courts Dismiss Meritorious Harassment Claims (with Jamillah Williams) (forthcoming, Connecticut Law Review 2026) [SSRN].
A common basis for granting summary judgment in workplace harassment claims is that the alleged harassment is insufficiently “severe or pervasive” to meet the legal standard. This mixed-methods study empirically tests whether there is a gap between how judges and potential jurors assess the same set of facts on the “severe or pervasive” element of a harassment claim.
Our results suggest a substantial divergence between judicial assessments and simulated jury assessments of the sampled cases. Judges granted summary judgment in favor of the employer or dismissed 65% of the harassment cases in the sample. By contrast, our simulated juries would have dismissed less than 20% of the very same cases.
Both our quantitative and qualitative findings shed light on the source of this divergence. The difference in assessment is not due to demographic differences between judges and the mock jurors, nor is it caused by shifting judicial assessments over time. Our qualitative results indicate that laypeople tend to view the fact patterns in a much more holistic manner than judges, which is consistent with guidance established by the Supreme Court.
Mind the Gap(s): Mitigating Harassment in a Post #MeToo Workplace, 98 S. Cal. L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2025) (with Jamillah Williams & Anu Ramdin) [SSRN]
We are the first to create a database of state legislation, including over three thousand bills, which allows us to empirically analyze the extent to which lawmakers comprehensively address harassment following the rise of the #MeToo movement.
We assess comprehensiveness by examining how responsive legislation is to existing gaps in legal protection during the five years following the 2017 tweet that took #MeToo activism global, relative to the 2016 baseline period. We found that states introduced a wide breadth of reforms to combat harassment and gender inequality, including some changes that address longstanding gaps in legal protection. Gaps persist, however, and in some cases worsened post #MeToo.
Does Lawyering Matter? Predicting Judicial Decisions from Legal Briefs, and What that Means for Access to Justice (with Charlotte Alexander, Karl Branting, Paul Morawski, Carlos Balhana, Craig Pfeifer, and Sam Bayer), 100 Tex. L. Rev. 1157 (2022) [SSRN].
This study uses linguistic analysis and machine learning techniques to predict summary judgment outcomes from the text of the parties’ briefs. We test the predictive power of textual characteristics, stylistic features, and citation usage, and find that citations to precedent – their frequency, their patterns, and their popularity in other briefs – are the most predictive of a summary judgment win.
This suggests that good lawyering may boil down to good legal research. However, good legal research is expensive, and the primacy of citations in our models raises concerns about access to justice. Here, our citation-based models also suggest promising solutions. We propose a freely available, computationally-enabled citation identification and brief bank tool, which would extend to all litigants the benefits of good lawyering and open up access to justice.
| Watch our presentation at Stanford’s Codex Meeting on Youtube. |
Enslaved Agents: Business Transactions Negotiated by Slaves in the Antebellum South, 63 Arizona Law Review 923 (2021) [SSRN].
This article explores the law of agency as applied to enslaved workers in the antebellum South between 1798 and 1863. In particular, I examine legal disputes involving the delegation of agency power to enslaved workers. Southern courts generally accepted that an enslaved worker could serve as business agent for his or her slaveholder, which often meant binding a third party to a transaction negotiated or performed by an enslaved person.
These cases provide a window into business practices in slave states, where enslaved workers conducted business on behalf of slaveholders in a variety of contexts. While agency law served the economic interests of individual slaveholders – who could then avoid hiring paid labor for the same work – it also at times conflicted with the ideology of white supremacy and the associated southern laws meant to enforce racial dominance.
Agency law bestowed the slaveholder’s power on an enslaved worker in transactions with third parties, often white businessmen who later sought to unwind the deal. The law of agency also conflicted at times with state laws that prohibited sales and business dealings with slaves. Nevertheless, southern courts frequently sided with slaveholders, who insisted that their powers could be delegated to enslaved workers.
Does Attorney Advertising Stimulate Adverse Event Reporting? (with Brian Chen) 74:4 Food & Drug Law J. 501 (2020) (peer reviewed) [Open access].
This study, in collaboration with economist Brian Chen, is the first to investigate whether drug injury advertising volume is associated with increased adverse event reporting through the Federal Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). The study analyzed 412,901 adverse event reports to FAERS, involving twenty-eight groups of drugs targeted in drug injury advertising over a one-year period.
The Legal Implications of the MeToo Movement, 103 Minn. L. Rev. 228 (2018) [SSRN].
This Article examines the implications of the MeToo movement for employment law and employment practices. Going forward, employers are likely to face increased liability for harassment, and greater risks of public scandals. Beyond taking a more punitive approach to documented instances of harassment, employers are likely to modify standard language in executive employment agreements and privacy policies.
The Article explores how standard harassment policies may have contributed to the problems exposed by the MeToo movement. The Article advocates for transparent harassment policies that disclose the contextual factors that influence disciplinary decisions. Employers should also draft broader discrimination policies that treat discriminatory and harassing comments by supervisors as a breach of trust.
Drug Injury Advertising (with Jesse King), 18 Yale J. of Health Pol’y, L. & Ethics 114 (2019) (peer reviewed) [SSRN].
Drug injury advertising, which solicits consumers for lawsuits against drug and medical device manufacturers, is a $114 million business. Yet little is known about how consumers respond to the medical information contained in those ads. This research applies insights from the field of marketing to the drug injury advertising context and further tests those insights through two experiments. Results suggest that some consumers are deceived by drug injury ads and that some types of advertising are more deceptive than others.
Harassment Trainings: A Content Analysis, 39 Berkeley J. Lab & Emp. L. 481 (2018) [SSRN].
This study reviewed the content of 74 current and historical harassment trainings spanning a period of 1980 to 2016. Results suggest that trainings are heavily influenced by early content developed in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Changes in training content over time are like software updates, periodically adding new features without fundamentally altering the nature of the training. Consequently, contemporary trainings include large quantities of tangential legal information and overemphasize sexual conduct at the expense of other forms of harassment.
How Employers Profit from Digital Wage Theft under the FLSA, 55(2) Am. Bus. L. J. 315 (2018) (peer reviewed) [ABLJ].
This study examined 330 wage and hour cases to better understand how employers use timekeeping software. It focused specifically on three different types of wage theft: (1) rounding — where the software alters punch time in a preset increment; (2) automatic break deductions — where break time is automatically deducted from employee time; and (3) time shaving — where managers alter an employee’s recorded time. Federal rules are not effective at deterring these practices.