In response to high-profile cases of police misconduct, reformers are calling for greater use of civilian allegations in identifying potential problem officers. This paper applies an Empirical Bayes framework to data on civilian allegations and civil rights litigation in Chicago to assess the predictive value of civilian allegations for serious future misconduct. We find a strong relationship between allegations and future civil rights litigation, especially for the very worst officers. The worst 1 percent of officers, as measured by civilian allegations, generate almost 5 times the number of payouts and over 4 times the total damage payouts in civil rights litigation. These findings suggest that intervention efforts could be fruitfully concentrated among a relatively small group. (JEL H76, K38, K42)

Volokh, and seminar participants at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. We are grateful to Dan Katz for providing data on the identities of district court and circuit court clerks.

This Article asks whether observable conflicts between Supreme Court justices-interruptions between the justices during oral arguments-can predict breakdowns in voting outcomes that occur months later. To answer this question, we built a unique dataset based on the transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments and justice votes in cases from 1960 to 2015. We find that on average a judicial pair is seven percent less likely to vote together in a case for each interruption that occurs between them in the oral argument for that case. While a conflict between the justices that leads to both interruptions and a breakdown in the voting coalition is one possible explanation of the finding, it is not the only one. An interruption by one justice of another justice could instead just reflect something about the case that renders it more prone to disagreement, such as being legally or politically salient, or something more idiosyncratic about the way the individual interrupting justice views the case. We set out an empirical strategy that isolates the conflict explanation from these and other possible explanations and find that the conflict inherent in interruptions explains over half of the relationship between interruptions and disagreement. These findings suggest that oral arguments are important in shaping judicial decisions-they are not simply a "dog and pony show"-and that there is valuable information about future case outcomes that has not previously been appreciated.

Volokh, and seminar participants at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. We are grateful to Dan Katz for providing data on the identities of district court and circuit court clerks.

Many state and local governments exclude some medical products from the sales tax base, including some that are primarily used by men such as hair growth products. However, tampons and other menstrual hygiene products are subject to sales taxes in most states. A recent social movement advocates for the repeal of these “tampon taxes” and several class action lawsuits have been filed against states citing equal protection violations. In this article, we use the 2005 elimination of menstrual hygiene products from the sales tax base in New Jersey as a natural experiment to study who benefits from the repeal of tampon taxes. We find that the tax break is fully shifted to consumers, but that the tax break is not distributed equally. Low‐income consumers enjoy a benefit from the repeal of the tax by more than the size of the repealed tax. For high‐income consumers, the tax break is shared equally with producers. The results suggest that repealing tampon taxes removes an unequal tax burden and could make menstrual hygiene products more accessible for low‐income consumers.