The German Constitutional Court has powers that are comparable to those of the US Supreme Court. For both, justices are openly selected by political parties. Nonetheless, public and professional perceptions of them are strikingly different. Justices on the German court are not believed to be guided by the policy preferences of their nominating parties. This paper uses publicly available data to investigate whether this perception is well founded and indeed finds little evidence that the justices' partisan affiliations predict case outcomes.
Regulatory oversight in digital markets faces a significant challenge. With millions of websites, apps, and service providers, monitoring compliance at scale is daunting. Existing empirical research often relies on firms' self-reported compliance. We argue that such an approach, while convenient, may systematically understate actual noncompliance. Using European privacy law as a case study-and focusing on the fallout from the European Court of Justice's 2020 invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield-we examine how over 2,500 apps from the Spanish Google Play store responded to this legal shift. We find divergence between firms' stated privacy policies and their cross-border data transfers. Drawing on tools from information technology security research to observe data flows, we show that traditional empirical legal methods may miss over 70 percent of privacy violations. These findings raise important questions for privacy scholarship and regulatory design, particularly in settings marked by limited observability and high information asymmetry.
Consumers seldom read or understand the terms of online contracts, even when those terms are visible on-screen. Across three experiments we show that using color to highlight a target clause can markedly improve consumers' visual recognition, unprompted understanding, and information-retrieval measures without decreasing their understanding of untreated clauses. By contrast, the prevailing approach of presenting a target clause in all capital letters is ineffective. A webcam eye-tracking study suggests that color may work by making the target clause visually distinctive-consistent with the isolation effect-without increasing reading time. However, we observe that color is less effective once multiple clauses are highlighted. These findings chart a practical route for strengthening conspicuousness standards in contract law.
For decades, advocates and observers have lambasted mandatory minimum sentencing laws, especially for drug crimes. In 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder instructed all federal prosecutors to stop charging mandatory minimums against defendants charged with low-level, nonviolent drug trafficking crimes who had minimal prior criminal records. This paper finds that federal prosecutors complied considerably with the charging policy, but this compliance did not translate into meaningful sentencing reductions for the defendants the policy sought to help. The paper suggests that these results are explained by the Holder reform's failure to account for entrenchment of mandatory minimums in federal criminal law, policy, and practice.
We quantitatively compare the use of legal authorities (cases, statutes, and literature) in three paragon jurisdictions of common law (England) and civil law (France and Germany). From each jurisdiction, we sample 40 representative opinions of its apex court in contract cases in the years 1880-89 and 2007-16. The odd one out, if any, is France, not England. England and Germany differ only in degree, not kind. For example, most German opinions were already citing and distinguishing precedent in the 1880s. However, the Germans tend to engage less closely with precedent than the English. Moreover, a new gap has developed with respect to the use of scholarly literature, which only the modern German court engages extensively. Our findings challenge popular accounts of differences and convergence between common and civil law.
