Most Popular Books by John R. Lott

This study reveals the ABA as systematically giving lower ratings to Republican circuit court nominees, although no similar bias appears to exist for district court nominees. The data shows how important it is to separate the evidence for circuit and district court nominees. This study fits in with my previous research showing that it is the brightest nominees who face the most difficult time getting confirmed. One difference with earlier findings is that the biases seem to be hidden and are worse than looking at the averages across administrations. For example, the oldest Republican nominees, who will not be on the court for long, receive the highest ratings. The reverse is true for Democratic nominees. Similarly, the research explains why Republican nominees tend to get their lowest evaluations from the ABA when the Democrats control the Senate. Another factor that stands out is that Republican nominees who have written opinion pieces suffer large much lower ratings than Democrats who have done the same thing.

Analyzing county level data for the entire United States from 1977 to 2000, we find annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. For the first five years that such a law is in effect, the total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year. Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results. Their own most generalized specification that breaks down the impact of the law on a year-by-year basis shows large crime reducing benefits. Virtually none of their claims that their county level hybrid model implies initial significant increases in crime are correct. Overall, the vast majority of their estimates based on data up to 1997 actually demonstrate that right-to-carry laws produce substantial crime reducing benefits. We show that their models also do an extremely poor job of predicting the changes in crime rates after 1997.

This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Because of the changing availability of the number of newspapers in Nexis/Lexis, two sets of time are examined from January 1991 to May 2004 and from January 1985 to May 2004. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the White House than when Republicans are, and a similar though smaller effect is found for Democratic control of Congress. Our results reject the claim that “reader diversity is a powerful force toward accuracy.” When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant. However, the results vary greatly depending upon which types of economic data are being reported. When newspapers are examined individually the only support that Republicans appear to obtain is from the president''s home state newspapers during his term. This is true for the Houston Chronicle under both Bushes and the Los Angeles Times during the Reagan administration. Contrary to rational expectations, media coverage affects people''s perceptions of the economy.

Both Republicans and Democrats complain about the difficulty in getting judges confirmed when it is their nominees who are up for confirmation, but there has not been any systematic study of either how much worse this problem has gotten nor what its causes might be. Several patterns do emerge for data from the beginning of Jimmy Carter''s administration through the end of George W. Bush''s first term. It is taking even longer for confirmation, and the more important the position, the longer confirmation takes. Among the findings, it took almost three times longer for Circuit Court judges to be confirmed under George W. Bush than under his father. The rate of confirmation for Circuit Court judges has also fallen while the confirmation rate for District Court judges has risen. Higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take much longer to get confirmed. Evaluated at the mean judicial quality, a one percent increase in judicial quality increases the length of the confirmation process by between 1 and 3 percent. Many of the traditional ex ante measures of judicial quality such as where they went to law school or a nominee''s American Bar Association ratings add little if anything to predicting how well they will do on the bench. A one percent increase in polarization in the voting differences between the political parties in the Senate produce between a 3 and 10 percent increase in the length of the confirmation process for Circuit Court judges. Even after accounting for quality differences, Republican Circuit Court nominees also have significantly lower ABA ratings than Democratic nominees and ABA scores don''t affect the length of Circuit Court confirmations.

"In the Grutter case, Justice O''Connor suggested that universities could justifiably try to enroll a "critical mass" of minority students. Enroll fewer than that "critical mass," reason some observers, and minority students will feel too marginalized to perform at their highest levels. In this article, we test whether minority students perform better with other students from their ethnic group in a class or school. To do so, we assemble data on the ethnicity and performance of each student in all classes at two law schools -- for three years at one, and for sixteen years at the other. We find no consistent evidence that having additional students from one''s ethnic group raises a student''s performance. Instead, we find some evidence that having additional ethnic peers lowers performance -- albeit by a very small amount. (US, Canada)"--John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business web site.

The results provide some evidence of vote fraud in U.S. general elections. Regulations that prevent fraud are shown to actually increase the voter participation rate. It is hard to see any evidence that voting regulations differentially harm either minorities, the elderly, or the poor. While this study examines a broad range of voting regulations, it is still too early to evaluate any possible impact of mandatory photo IDs on U.S. elections. What can be said is that the non-photo ID regulations that are already in place have not had the negative impacts that opponents predicted. The evidence provided here also found that campaign finance regulations generally reduced voter turnout.