While Stata's graph commands can be notoriously complicated, some can be worth the effort. For example, adding CI shading to a conventional line graph permits researchers to move from this:
to something like this:
How to do so in Stata is discussed here.
Questions about whether justice is, indeed, blind, persist. One particular question, whether judges treat litigants differently based on ethnicity, continues to receive attention in the United States as well as Europe.
In a recent contribution to this literature, Do German Judges Treat People With Foreign Names Differently? A Vignette Experiment, the authors, Alexander Morell (Goethe Univ.-Frankfurt) and Aileen Oeberst (Indep.), report experimental findings drawn from 282 sitting German judges designed to assess whether "German judges evaluate a case differently when the defendant bears a Turkish rather than a German name." To do so, the authors executed a preregistered vignette experiment in a 2 × 2 between-subject design featuring two experimental factors: the defendant’s name (Turkish versus German) and the consistency of the witness testimony.
While the study’s main results reassure as they “show little evidence of average differential treatment by defendant name across most outcomes,” one of the study’s robustness checks finds “an interaction between the consistency of the evidence and the effect of a Turkish name." An excerpted abstract follows.
It is with a heavy heart that I note the passing of Prof. Tom Ulen, a leading empirical (and theoretical) law and economics scholar. Along with his seminal scholarly contributions, Tom will also be remembered for his kindness, warmth, mentorship, and humor. Tom is already deeply missed by many. (Click here for a memorial notice from the European Association of Law and Economics.)
Registration
Registration is now open for the 2026 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS), which will take place on October 2-3, 2026, at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. Registration, hotel information, travel grant information, and more are available on the conference website: https://cels2026.com.
We encourage participants to register and reserve hotel accommodations as soon as possible.
Hotel Information
We have reserved a block of rooms at The Wade hotel near Northwestern Law at a conference rate of $189 per night. The conference block is available for October 1-2, 2026, and the deadline to reserve a room at The Wade Hotel at the CELS 2026 group rate is Friday, September 11, 2026.
Book at The Wade at the CELS 2026 group rate.
If you would like to arrive earlier or depart later, please contact the hotel directly:
While trademark law resides a bit afar from my usual "sandboxes," a recent paper in this area accompanies the release of a related open-access dataset. In the paper, The Japan Trademarks Dataset: An Open-access Resource, Jeremy Sheff (St. John's) emphasizes how building such datasets, along with making them open-access, "is thus crucial to ensuring the continued progress of our understanding of trademarks and their operation in the world."
To this end, the Japan Trademarks Dataset (link here) includes "all data preserved by the Japan Patent Office on trademark applications, registrations, and administrative proceedings (including data on parties, examiners, prosecution history events, and interactions with the international trademark system) from the inception of Japan’s trademark system in the late 19th century through September 25, 2019."