Working Papers

The Evolution of Experiential Legal Education
Current Draft: August 2025 (with Peter Joy & Kyle Rozema)

To help bridge the gap between legal education and legal practice, in 2014 the American Bar Association adopted a requirement that law students take at least six credits of "experiential" courses. Despite limited research on the effects of this reform, the ABA is currently considering a new reform that would require law students to take twice as many experiential credits to graduate. We provide new evidence for this debate by studying the evolution of experiential legal education and the impacts of the 2014 reform. We compile data reported by law schools to the ABA to document a dramatic rise in the number of experiential opportunities available to students even before the reform, and we find no evidence that the reform improved bar passage rates or employment outcomes. However, we also find no evidence that the reform increased tuition. We then use transcript data from one law school to study how the 2014 reform impacted students' course selections. We find evidence suggesting that the reform expanded access to clinics primarily to students least inclined to benefit from them but without displacing students most inclined to benefit from them.

Constitutional Drafting Process and Constitutional Success
Current Draft: October 2025 (with Murat Mungan & Mila Versteeg)

Several recent constitution-making processes have been celebrated for being participatory, inclusive, and representative. However, many of these processes also failed. We theorize that aspects of these kinds of constitutional drafting processes could reduce the probability of constitutional success. To show why, we construct a "Constitution Drafting game" (CD game) in which representatives from different interest groups must draft a constitution. We consider the case where the probability of constitutional success is single peaked, but the value from successful adoption is increasing in the degree of issue protection chosen. The drafting process then leads to protection choices that are above those which maximize the odds of constitutional success. Moreover, when the CD game is equivalent to a "nice aggregative game", as in Acemoglu and Jensen (2013), the maximum and minimum equilibrium probabilities of constitutional success are decreasing in the number of representatives. Within a more specific game structure, we show that the symmetric equilibrium degree of protection chosen by each representative is decreasing in the number of interest groups represented, while the total degree of protection is increasing in it, leading to lower probabilities of constitutional success. We also show that optimism can exacerbate the degree of protection chosen by each party and also increase the rate at which constitutional success is decreasing in the number of interest groups represented.

Occupational Licensing and Labor Market Mobility: Evidence from The Legal Profession
Current Draft: August 2024 (with Jacob Goldin, Kyle Rozema, & Sarath Sanga)

We study how state occupational licensing requirements shape labor mobility across U.S. legal markets. Drawing on newly collected data, we link variation in state bar exam waiver policies to lawyers’ license acquisitions, professional disciplinary records, and educational histories. We find that bar exam waivers increase the number of experienced lawyers obtaining a new license by 38 percent, but that the additional lawyers are subject to more professional discipline and tend to have graduated from less selective law schools. Our results suggest that state-level occupational licensing regimes can create a trade-off between the supply and quality of professionals in an industry.

Identifying Constitutional Law
Current Draft: December 2021 (with Mila Versteeg)

Empirical research in comparative constitutional law has largely relied on coding countries’ “large-C” constitution—that is, the text of the written constitution—and not their “small-c” constitution—that is, the larger set of interpretations, conventions, and laws that can also be part of constitutional law. The potential biases associated with approach to coding constitutional law has been repeatedly raised as a criticism of this line of research. That said, incorporating small-c constitutional sources into empirical comparative constitutional law research first requires developing an approach to systematically identifying small-c constitutional law across countries. We outline three possible kinds of approaches for doing so: (1) Entrenchment Approaches, which emphasize entrenchment as the defining feature of constitutions and constitutional law; (2) External Approaches, which emphasize core constitutional functions, such as structuring and limiting government and rights; and (3) Internal Approaches, which emphasize local understandings of the constitution and constitutional law. While these approaches yield only minor differences when identifying Large-C constitutions, they produce substantial differences when identifying small-c constitutional sources. We argue that which approach is most suitable depends on the objectives of the comparative research project.