Empirical
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Schlanger's
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Student
Commons |
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Monday, 3 to 5 pm
Room 309
Professor: Margo Schlanger
Room 574
mschlanger@wulaw.wustl.edu
My webpage
Assistant: Sherrie Malone (Room 573)
Office Hours: By appointment, or just drop by.
Teaching assistants:
Michael Lynch (graduate student,
Political Science), office hours: Wednesday, 1-2:30, Eliot 300 (the Weidenbaum Center) -- ask for Michael when you enter the door.
Matthew Schneider
(graduate student, Political Science), office hours: Thursday, 11:30 to 1, Eliot 107.
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Course description (+)
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Students in this course will conduct an
empirical investigation into some (small) aspect of the currently hot
question in judicial administration, Where have all the trials gone? The
question is provoked by a sharp trend; the absolute number of trials has
declined by 60% over the past 20 years, even as court filings have
risen. The entire federal court system conducted fewer than 4600 civil
trials in 2002; only 1.8% of filings were resolved by trial. Hypotheses
abound to explain the decline; each student will pick a hypothesis and
try to make at least some headway in testing it, using quantitative or
qualitative data (chiefly systematic case filings and terminations data,
individual case dockets, and interviews). Students will have ready
access to a comprehensive civil case dataset maintained by the
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, as well as to docket sheets
that enable closer review. Some or all students will also be able to
work with at least one federal district court, to investigate trends and
their causes in that limited setting. As this description makes clear,
the seminar will revolve entirely around student papers. We will meet
several times in the beginning of the semester and then as needed, first
to discuss the extant evidence of disappearing trials and the available
explanations, and then, once students pick paper topics, to deal with
both substantive and methodological questions. In addition, several
individual meetings with the instructor are required and a teaching
assistant will be available to help students substantially with
quantitative methods and computing. Topics for papers will be chosen by
the students, but with a good deal of guidance and input of the
instructor. In total, students must submit a topic statement, a research
plan, a first draft, and a final, revised version of the paper. The
instructor will provide feedback at each of these stages. (Seminars are
not graded anonymously because the professor works with students on
their writing project throughout the semester.) 3 units.
Permanent Announcements:
Old announcements will be archived here.
Scheduling note: Although we will not meet every week, I will
nonetheless expect you to be available during the scheduled class time to meet as
a class, or with me individually or in a group. Some members of
the class may wish to attend the paper sessions of the Law and Politics
seminar, which meets at the same time as our class; I will try to accommodate this scheduling conflict. (The
Law and Politics presentation schedule is here.)
March 4 , 2006:
I've met with a number of you over the past week, and I'd like to meet with the rest this week. I can only do this Thursday and Friday, however, and I know that (given spring break) this may not work for you. So, if you can, please sign up on the sheet on my door for a meeting on Thursday or Friday. (Thursday 10-4 and Friday, 1-3). These are going to be fairly long meetings; I can solve a bunch of stata and other problems that way. Please try to post your data on the dropbox site I told you about earlier, before our meeting.
If you can't meet those times, send me an e-mail and we'll meet the week after break. (I may also have about an hour available on Wednesday afternoon, if you're around then, but not Thursday or Friday.)
In any event, I had hoped to have first drafts by March 27, but I'm hearing that people's progress has been slow. So what I've decided to do is to make the first draft optional. I think you'd be well advised to do one, but it's up to you. If you're going to do a first draft, I need it at least two weeks prior to your final paper, so that I have time to read it and meet with you to discuss it. (Final copies of your papers are due between April 21 (without any extension) and May 5 (with an extension that will be freely granted); I have no ability to extend the deadline beyond that.)
Instead of a first draft, what is required by March 27th is what I described earlier in the semester as a "research plan and progress report." This is a written statement summarizing your topic, the research questions you are addressing, and your plan for addressing them. It should include a bibliography of writing by other scholars and practitioners about your topic, and a description of the materials you are examining in your research and of the interviews you are conducting. It should explain what you’ve done so far and what is left, and should alert me to possible problems.
To the extent you wish (and particularly if you don't think you're going to do a first draft), the progress report can include more than that -- an outline, or an introduction, or one part of your paper, or whatever. You may find it helpful to get my feedback on whatever you have.
So, to summarize:
If you haven't seen me in the past week, please try to sign up on my door for a meeting on Thursday or Friday. If those days don't work for you, send me an e-mail and we'll meet after break. I'm no longer going to require a first draft, but instead a research plan and progress report, by March 27. If you choose to do a first draft, you should hand it in at least two weeks prior to when you're planning to complete your paper.
Please let me know if you have any concerns about all this. If I don't talk to you, have a great break.
February 17, 2006:
Here are a number of memos (also posted under handouts/postings):
Using Stata
The lab session do-file
Using do-files
As I mentioned in class, we will not meet this coming week, Feb. 20; please try to make some
real progress on your papers, and let me know where you are sometime next week, by e-mail.
February 3, 2006:
Here's the memo on docket research.
I am not including the PACER userid and password in it, because it is not password protected: I'll e-mail these to you. As I mentioned in my e-mail, we will not meet this coming week as a class. Please try to get started on your papers, and e-mail me a couple of sentences by Friday on what kind of progress you've made.
Jan. 31, 2006:
Our docket training is set. So far, just one person has rsvp'd for Wednesday. So please let me know ASAP if that's when you want to do it. The place on Wednesday will be my office, at 1 pm. On Thursday, we'll be in room 201 at 11:30. FYI, the districts for which I have free PACER access for the semester are:
Southern District of Alabama
Southern District of Iowa
Central District of Illinois
Southern District of Illinois
District of Massachusetts
Eastern District of Missouri
District of New Hampshire
Eastern District of New York
Western District of North Carolina
District of South Dakota
Northern District of Texas
Western District of Washington
Eastern District of Wisconsin
Western District of Wisconsin
Jan. 30, 2006:
I'll teach two sessions on docket research, the first on Wednesday, from 1:00 to 2:00, the second on Thursday from 11:30 to 12:30.
Both will be in the small computer lab. Tomorrow, I'll post the list of districts to which we have free PACER access.
Please let me know via e-mail if you'll be coming to one of the docket sessions (so I can cancel one if nobody is coming). Thanks.
Jan. 25, 2006 (updated 1/27/06):
We'll meet at the usual time on Monday, to introduce you to the AO civil terminations dataset and Stata. There is no particular assignment for class; please continue to work on your papers as we have discussed.
I've posted (under handouts/postings/slides) the powerpoint presentation on writing a paper, and the schedule for the papers. UPDATE: I've also posted a codebook of the consolidated database, and several of the original codebooks. These include the counties and other details. In addition, I want to repeat the other course requirement: each week we don't meet, I need to get an e-mail from you with a couple of sentences on your progress. This can, occasionally but not more than occasionally, say nothing more than "I didn't do any work on my paper this week." |
