The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Student Blogger - If you let me play sports, I will do better in life.

In the mid 90s, Nike ran a commercial extolling the virtues of letting high school girls play sports. “If you let me play, I will . . .” Many studies have backed up Nike’s commercial, showing that those who play sports make more money, receive more schooling, are more self confident, etc. However, these studies may be biased by a selection effect—people who choose to play sports may simply be different than those who do not. For example, motivated people that naturally do better in the workplace may also choose to play sports at a younger age. Since the people who play sports are not a random sample of the population, it is hard to determine whether playing sports benefits the people who play them. There has never been a “natural” experiment where people have been randomly assigned to play sports that would allow us to determine whether playing sports has positive effects.

However, Title IX and the sudden increase in girls playing sports in the 1970s provide a very good substitute for such a natural experiment. Title IX was passed in 1972 and banned gender discrimination in schools. It wasn’t immediately clear how or whether this would apply to sports, but it subsequently became clear that schools would have to make efforts to increase girls’ participation rates. Regardless, once Title IX was passed, schools got the hint immediately and started providing opportunities for girls to play sports. The increase was drastic with girls’ participation rates increasing from almost zero in 1972 to over 25% in 1978, when schools were required to be in compliance.

Professor Betsey Stevenson in a recent paper examined the increase in girls’ sports participation rates in different states to determine the effects of playing sports. Before Title IX, boys’ participation rates varied throughout the United States, anywhere from 25% to near full participation. With the passage of Title IX, schools had to attempt to raise girls’ participation rates to match the boys. This eventually led to girls’ participation rates that were very well correlated with boys’ participation rates. On average, the girls’ participation rate became about half of the boys’ participation rate in each state. Using this, Stevenson could get around the selection effect problem by comparing the changes in educational and vocational outcomes across cohorts for different states and comparing that with the change in girls’ participation as predicted by the pre-Title IX boys’ participation rates for the older cohort, while controlling for other variables such as regional differences and economic status.  Since there is no a priori reason why the change in educational and vocation outcomes should be correlated with the change in girls’ sports participation as predicted by the pre-Title IX rates of boys’ participation, the relationship between the two can be interpreted as causal.

Student Blogger - Can Obama Influence the Court?

Many have speculated that President Obama could have the power to shape a new Supreme Court. Some predict he could have as many as three Supreme Court appointments in his first term alone, given the ages and political persuasions of the current Justices.

Commentators tend to believe that turnover is most likely to occur at the liberal end of the Court, which includes Stevens (88), Ginsburg (75), Breyer (70), and Souter (69). Although Souter is the youngest of the four liberal Justices, he has reportedly expressed interest in returning to his home in New Hampshire, triggering speculation that he might retire. It is considered less likely Obama will get to fill a vacancy left by one of the conservative members of the Court, which includes Scalia (72), Kennedy (72), Thomas (60), Alito (58), and Roberts (54).

Given this landscape, it is not entirely clear how Obama can shape the Supreme Court with potential nominees. Some have argued that he won’t be able to change the Court at all if he’s merely able to replace one liberal Justice with another, while others have argued that replacing moderately liberal Justices with more full-throated liberals could have a significant impact on the Court. At the bottom of this disagreement lies a question of how Supreme Court case outcomes are determined.

Last Wednesday Professor Tonja Jacobi presented a paper to the Workshop on Judicial Behavior that attempted to answer that question. Jacobi and her coauthor, Professor Matthew Sag, attempted to empirically test what determines Supreme Court case outcomes, focusing on three potential models of judicial behavior: the Ideological model, the Collegiate model, and the Strategic model.

Student Blogger - IP for the Rest of Us?

Professor Madhavi Sunder on IP law and those it leaves behind

People love to complain about IP law, and not just in academia. From attempts to halt distribution of Danger Mouse's Grey Album to DMCA takedowns of YouTube videos of toddlers dancing along to Prince, many people think IP law is stifling creation or even culture. At the same time, IP law often seems to hurt poor people, like Ethiopian coffee farmers who have difficulty protecting their brand or creators of cultural works like Mbube (the African hit that was the source material for The Lion Sleeps Tonight) who lack access to IP protections. These anecdotal complaints and the broader issues that underlie them have become a part of widespread conversation.

In this week's Works in Progress (WiP) talk, Professor Madhavi Sunder presented excerpts from her upcoming book, "iP: YouTube, MySpace, Our Culture" (Yale University Press). In the book, Prof. Sunder looks at the sources of these controversies and offers ideas about how law should change to address them. 

Student Blogger - Is Feminism A Live Issue?

Last week Judge Posner and Professors Nussbaum and Case faced off in a much-anticipated debate entitled "Posner Answers the Feminists" (moderated by Professor Stone). The talk (which you can listen to here) was inspired by articles written by Nussbaum and Case for a Symposium published by the University of Chicago Law Review commemorating Posner’s 25 years on the bench.  Both professors wrote on the topic of Posner’s sexual harassment jurisprudence. See here for Case’s article and here for Nussbaum’s.

But what began as a discussion about specific sexual harassment opinions seemed to transform into a debate over the state of feminism in the United States. Posner questioned whether feminism is still a "live issue" in the United States given his view that women are outperforming men at all educational levels and forging ahead in all professions, including in the military. In Posner’s words, women are now dropping bombs on people "just like the boys." "If that isn’t equality," he joked, "I don’t know what is."

American Legal History Workshop

This spring, another workshop will join the bumper crop already on offer at the Law School: the American Legal History Workshop.The workshop builds upon the Law School’s long tradition of exploring the intersections between law and history in America from the colonial period to the present, in the realms of both public and private law. This year’s speakers have produced pathbreaking work on a wide variety of chronological and thematic topics, from the constitutional law of Britain's North American empire, to early American property and tort law, to the twentieth-century civil rights revolution. They are Daniel Hulsebosch, NYU Law School (April 2); Mary Dudziak, USC Gould School of Law (April 16); John Witt, Columbia Law School(April 23); and Claire Priest, Northwestern Law School (May 21).

Student Blogger - Chicago’s Best Ideas: Martha Nussbaum and Judge Diane Wood, "Constitutions and Capabilities: A Dialogue about Political Philosophy and the Judge’s Role"

Update: Audio of this talk is now available, and video of the talk is embedded after the jump.

A perception exists that little communication occurs between the ivory tower of legal academia and the trenches of legal practice. The Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Monday, February 2 tried to bridge this gap by "making philosophy confront reality," according to Professor Martha Nussbaum, the first speaker. Nussbaum started building the bridge on the philosophical side, extending her remarks into the legal implementation of her philosophy, and Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit started on the legal side, extending into the hopes for applying a coherent philosophy to decisionmaking.