Working Papers

Alternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession
Current Draft: November 2025 (with Giulia G. Cusenza, Lorenzo G. Luisetto, & Kyle Rozema)

Obtaining a law degree from an ABA-approved law school has long been the primary path into the American legal profession. However, some states have alternative educational pathways, including earning a law degree from a non-ABA-approved law school or completing supervised legal study. Using data from 1984 and 2019, we investigate the track record of these alternative pathways into the legal profession. We find that alternative pathways have been available at some point in all but 11 states, raising questions about the extent to which the ABA's gatekeeping role exerts anti-competitive control over entry into the profession. However, we also find that individuals with alternative legal training pass the bar exam at drastically lower rates than graduates of ABA-approved law schools. This disparity persists across every state, demonstrating states' inability to regulate alternative pathways effectively. Moreover, we find that lawyers with alternative legal training have meaningfully worse career outcomes and pose a greater risk to the public than other lawyers, which may help explain why alternative pathways have not taken off as a more prominent mode of legal training. 

The Evolution of Experiential Legal Education
Current Draft: November 2025 (with Erik Hovenkamp, Peter Joy, & Kyle Rozema)

To help bridge the gap between legal education and legal practice, in 2014 the American Bar Association ("ABA") 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 theory and evidence for the debate over requiring experiential education. We study a model of the law school labor market that is compatible with the ABA's stated rationales for experiential learning requirements to generate testable predictions for the presence of market failures, including how the requirements should affect employment outcomes. To test these predictions, we first compile data to study the evolution of experiential legal education and the impacts of the 2014 reform. We 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 employment outcomes. However, we also find no evidence that the reform increased tuition or had a negative effect on bar passage. 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: March 2026 (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.