Haves and Have-Nots before the Law Lords

Abstract

One important characteristic of justice, and thus of our judicial system, is impartiality. One type of judicial impartiality is impartiality between litigants who command status and material resources ('haves') and those who do not ('have-nots'). I investigate the success of 'haves' in appeals to the House of Lords between 1969 and 2003. I investigate two separate paths by which 'haves' might succeed more: relative status advantage over other litigants, and being able to hire more experienced and more successful counsel. My innovative operationalisation of relative status advantage shows that while relative status advantage does exist, it is largely a matter of governmental actors having significant advantages over all others; businesses and associations have no advantages over individual litigants. Instructing more experienced counsel also increases the chances of a litigant succeeding. This effect holds when accounting for the relative number of counsel and their relative win rates in previous cases. © 2013 Political Studies Association

Lawyer rankings either do not matter for litigation outcomes or are redundant

“…Governments have slightly better odds of success than the baseline category (limited companies), as we might expect given the literature on government advantage in litigation (McGuire, 1998;McCormick, 1993;Hanretty, 2013;cf. Smyth, 2000).…”

“…The literature in political science has concentrated on appellate outcomes, which can in most cases be reduced to a binary variable (either the appeal succeeds or it does not), and which has employed indirect measures of lawyer quality (for example: Justice Blackmun's letter grades assigned to counsel at oral argument (Johnson et al, 2006) or experience (Haynie and Sill, 2007) or senior counsel status (Szmer et al, 2007) or past record (Hanretty, 2013)) to test whether better counsel win more appeals. A more general literature in empirical legal studies has focused on continuous outcomes, sometimes monetary outcomes in personal injury cases (Moorhead et al, 1994;Rosenthal, 1974) but more often sentence lengths in criminal trials, where the stakes are particularly high for clients (Abrams and Yoon, 2007;Shinall, 2010).…”

“…I collected information on 116 coefficients from 11 different studies (Farole Jr, 1999;Haire et al, 1999;Hanretty, 2013;Haynie, 1994;McGuire, 1995McGuire, , 1998Sheehan et al, 1992;Songer and Sheehan, 1992;Songer et al, 1999Songer et al, , 2000Szmer et al, 2007). The required magnitude on the rank-based measure was greater than 82.8% of coefficients in the cited studies, and greater than greater than 91.4% of coefficients on the list-based measure.…”

Does the Law Matter? Win Rates and Law Reforms

“…High win rates for the state have been reported for decades in various empirical studies, in Israel and in other countries (Dotan 1999a; Cohen & Spitzer ; Wheeler et al. :418; Songer & Sheehan :241; Huang ; Hanretty ; Weatherall & Jensen ; McCormick ; Atkins :894–95; He & Su ). For example, in the United States, the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate's annual report to Congress for 2011 indicated that the IRS's win rate is over 90 percent in its key court proceedings.…”

Empirical insights into corporate defamation: an analysis of cases decided 2004–2013

“…Any dividing line by Chris Hanretty, which found that the relative experience of counsel had an effect on the decisions of the House of Lords. 230 If true, this may also be a factor in the 'inequality of arms' problem, in that some corporate claimants have better access to experienced counsel than individual defendants. Another interpretation might be that unrepresented defendants are less likely to be advised to settle their cases.…”