Thomson Reuters SDC Platinum 3.0 is now available for download and installation.

Thomson Reuters encourages users of versions 2.3b and earlier to upgrade to take advantage of the many new features and enhancements offered by version 3.0. See the HLSL SDC Platinum download & installation page for detailed instructions. (HLS email username and password required)

Thomson Reuters SDC Platinum is a software-based tool for analyzing corporate finance and capital markets transaction information. We have subscribed to the SDC Platinum Global New Issues and Mergers & Acquisitions databases. Interested in finding out more about data resources available to you? See HLSL Data Resources for a listing of data resources useful for legal research.

Stanley Fish has an opinion piece in the New York Times for January 27, 2008 entitled “Does Constitutional Theory Matter?” In this essay he discusses a new book by Sotirios Barber and James Fleming called Constitutional interpretation : the basic questions, which is on reserve at Langdell.  This is what PrawfBlawg thinks about the essay.

A new Congressional Research Service report discusses “How Crime in the United States is Measured”. 

Crime data collected through the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National
Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS) are used by Congress to inform policy decisions and allocate federal
criminal justice funding to states. As such, it is important to understand how each
program collects and reports crime data, and the limitations associated with the data.
This report reviews (1) the history of the UCR, the NIBRS, and the NCVS; (2)
the methods each program uses to collect crime data; and (3) the limitations of the
data collected by each program. The report then compares the similarities and
differences of UCR and NCVS data. It concludes by reviewing issues related to the
NIBRS and the NCVS.

The United Nations recently announced MDG Monitor, “a pioneering online site that tracks progress towards decreasing global poverty by 2015, a global campaign known as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.”

The new site, developed in partnership with Google and Cisco Systems, provides the most current data available as well as bird’s-eye views of global efforts to fight poverty. See the press releases from the United Nations Development Programme and Google for more information.

Skadden: D. Choate, Hall: C+. Ropes & Gray: B-. Looking at a law firm? Check its report card first.

Building a Better Legal Profession, a grassroots movement begun by law students at Stanford, wants law students, law schools, and law firm clients to exercise their market power by engaging only those firms demonstrating a commitment to demographic diversity, pro bono participation and billable hour reforms. BBLP has created diversity rankings and diversity report cards to draw attention to differences between law firms. BBLP produces statistics on law firms employing more than 100 attorneys in six major markets: New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Northern California and Southern California-LA. The BBLP Diversity Rankings cover five groups underrepresented in the legal profession: women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered individuals (LGBT). BBLP obtained its data from the National Association for Legal Career Professionals directory of law firm employment statistics. See the New York Times for recent news coverage (registration required).

The Equal Justice Initiative has recently released Cruel and Unusual: Sentencing 13- and 14-Year-Old Children to Die in Prison, a study documenting 73 cases where 13 and 14 year-old children in the United States have been tried as adults and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. 

The Equal Justice Initiative, through the study and an accompanying Fact Sheet, hope to raise public awareness of its litigation campaign to challenge “death in prison” sentences imposed on young children. See Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking Second Chance, By Adam Liptak, New York Times, October 17, 2007 (registration required).

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the implementation authority for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has recently called for the abolishment of “all forms of life imprisonment for offences committed by persons under the age of 18” as being “explicitly prohibited under article 37 (a)” of the Convention. See General Comment No. 10: Children’s Rights in Juvenile Justice, ¶¶ 11 and 77, U.N. Doc. CRC/C/GC/10 (Apr. 25, 2007). See also, Amnesty Int’l & Human Rights Watch, The Rest of Their Lives: Life Without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States (2005).

For Supreme Court or legislative history buffs, check out Liberal Justices’ Reliance on Legislative History: Principle, Strategy, and the Scalia Effect, an empirical legal studies paper newly released on SSRN. (Follow the downloading options listed below the abstract.)

The article, which focuses on the Burger, Rehnquist, and early Roberts eras, presents a strong case “against the idea that legislative history is a ‘politicized’ resource.” To learn more about the legislative history resources available in the Harvard Law School Library, check out this Legislative History Source Locator Guide written by Terry Swanlund.

Prospective students and others interested in doing their own comparisons of law schools can access this searchable online version of the 2008 ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools. 

In addition, as noted here by the Empirical Legal Studies Blog, the ABA has posted all of the 2008 “official guide” data on legal education in downloadable excel files. 

A study of 133,000 asylum decisions by 884 asylum officers over a seven year period has found “the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge.”

The study, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, was released today on SSRN and will be published in 60 Stanford Law Review. See the article Big Disparities in Judging of Asylum Cases in todays New York Times for more coverage.

Has the immigration reform bill piqued your interest in the nation’s current immigration policy?  Noted on the excellent BeSpacific blog, a “new and well-documented view of the nation’s massive immigration enforcement program has been made possible as a result of a Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) analysis of millions of detailed records obtained from the Immigration Courts (EOIR) under the Freedom of Information Act.”

These administrative courts, part of the Justice Department, are a key part of the government’s program to deport or remove undocumented aliens as well as noncitizens who have been granted legal status to be in this country. The massive study of the administrative actions in the immigration courts has been supplemented by a separate examination of other records collected by the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA) that document criminal prosecutions in U.S. federal district courts.
The over 4 million EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] records that TRAC obtained stretch back for many decades. The work of classifying the charges into comparable immigration, criminal, national security and terrorism categories, however, has been completed for the fifteen year period from FY 1992 to date and is the primary focus of the accompanying report.

TRAC’s TRACFED database, which provides a wide range of information about federal enforcement activities as well as detailed information about federal staffing, federal funds, and the diverse characteristics of counties, federal districts, and states is available to Harvard law students and faculty through a Law Library subscription.  For off-campus access, or more information, see the instructions here. 

In what contexts has the Supreme Court discussed torture in the last 20 years?  How many times were the framers mentioned in oral arguments during the Warren Court period as compared to the Rehnquist years?  Soon, you’ll be able to search through the text and audio of thousands of hours of Supreme Court argument going as far back as the Warren Court. 

In the forthcoming Oyez database, political scientists Timothy Johnson (Univ. of Minnesota) and Jerry Goldman (Northwestern), along with Brian MacWhinney of Carnegie Mellon and Mark Liberman of Penn, will be making available searchable digitized audio and transcripts of thousands of hours of U.S. Supreme Court argument.  According to Johnson’s post on Empirical Legal Studies, the database will include all audio the Court has released beginning with the Warren Court up through the present day.  He continues:

Simultaneously, we are appending sentence aligned transcripts to the audio so that the text and audio are fully searchable.

Additionally, we have created software that will allow users to search, code, and save data from the arguments or opinion announcements.  We envision these data being used across disciplines—from political science, to law, linguistics, history, and rhetoric.  Already we have collected cases back through the early 1990s and we already have audio files back to 1979.  These are in the process of being digitized and appended to their transcripts.

The Oyez Project has been making audio recordings of the Court’s proceedings available via the Web for many years, but the new database will make the data much more accessible to scholarly analysis.

Carolyn Shapiro, a new permanent editor at one of our favorite blogs, Empirical Legal Studies has this post on a forthcoming article on potential systemic unfairness in teaching evaluations. 

"In Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching, an article that will appear in St. John’s Law Review in November, Deborah J. Merritt of Ohio State Moritz College of Law argues that students’ stereotypes and biases affect their evaluations of their professors, and in ways that may particularly disadvantage women and minorities.  The abstract explains that student assessments of teaching “respond overwhelmingly to a professor’s appearance and nonverbal behavior.” Merritt reports that “ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations.” The very interesting article includes an impressive and eye-opening survey of research and concludes with recommendations for creating a more meaningful system for evaluating teaching."

The excellent blog Empirical Legal Studies has this timely entry on a recent paper by Joseph Price (Cornell, Econ--grad. student) and Justin Wolfers (Penn, Wharton) entitled Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees.

The paper compares the rates at which white referees call fouls on black players (and black referees call fouls on white players), and concludes there is racial bias “sufficiently large that we find appreciable differences in whether predominantly black teams are more likely to win or lose, according to the racial composition of the refereeing crew.”