Thomas J. Miles’s research while affiliated with University of Chicago and other places

Solving crimes often requires community cooperation. Cooperation is thought by many scholars to depend critically on whether community members believe that law enforcement institutions are legitimate and trustworthy. Yet establishing an empirical link between legitimacy and cooperation has proven elusive, with most studies relying on surveys or lab experiments of people’s beliefs and attitudes, rather than on their behavior in the real world. This Article aims to overcome these shortcomings, capitalizing on a unique natural policy experiment to directly address a fundamental question about legitimacy, cooperation, and law enforcement success: do de-legitimating policy interventions actually undermine community cooperation with the police? The policy experiment is a massive federal immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities. Secure Communities was widely criticized for undermining the legitimacy of local police in the eyes of immigrants, and it was rolled out nationwide over a four-year period in a way that approximates a natural experiment. Using the rate at which police solve crimes as a proxy for community cooperation, we find no evidence that the program reduced community cooperation — despite its massive size and broad scope. The results call into question optimistic claims that discrete policy interventions can, in the short run, meaningfully affect community perceptions of law enforcement legitimacy in ways that shape community cooperation with police.

Which judges are “good” at their jobs, and which are not? The answer may depend on the ideology of whom you ask. Judicial decisions inevitably involve policy making, and lawyers may prefer judges whose policy preferences match their own. This paper tests that prediction with online evaluations of judges. Criminal defense attorneys, a group likely to hold progressive views, make up a disproportionate share of the respondents. The respondents assign lower average scores to Republican appointees, especially female and minority ones, even after controlling for the judges’ backgrounds and performance measures. In comments, respondents object to judges with conservative tendencies more often than those with liberal ones. The objections to conservative tendencies correlate with large reductions in a judge’s numerical ratings, while objections to liberal ones do not. The results suggest that judicial evaluation surveys should take account of how attorneys’ ideology influences their perceptions of judicial performance.

Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration—detention and deportation—has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.

There is a long scholarly debate on the trade-off between research and teaching in various fields, but relatively little study of the phenomenon in law. This analysis examines the relationship between the two core academic activities at one particular school, the University of Chicago Law School, which is considered one of the most productive in legal academia. We measure of scholarly productivity with the total number of publications by each professor for each year, and we approximate performance in teaching with course loads and average scores in student evaluations for each course. In OLS regressions, we estimate scholarly output as a function of teaching loads, faculty characteristics, and other controls. We also estimate teaching evaluation scores as a function of scholarly productivity, fixed effects for years and course subject, and faculty characteristics. Net of other factors, we find that, under some specifications, research and teaching are positively correlated. In particular, we find that students' perceptions of teaching quality rises, but at a decreasing rate, with the total amount of scholarship. We also find that certain personal characteristics correlate with productivity. The recent debate on the mission of American law schools has hinged on the assumption that a trade-off exists between teaching and research, and this article's analysis, although limited in various ways, casts some doubt on that assumption.

In 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), prohibiting the knowing receipt of funds for the purpose of unlawful gambling. The principal consequence of the UIGEA was the shutdown of the burgeoning online poker industry in the United States. Courts determine whether a game is prohibited gambling by asking whether skill or luck is the "dominant factor" in the game. We argue that courts' conception of a dominant factor- whether chance swamps the effect of skill in playing a single hand of poker-is unduly narrow. We develop four alternative tests to distinguish the impact of skill and luck, and we test these predictions against a unique data set of thousands of hands of Texas Hold 'Em poker played for sizable stakes online before the passage of the UIGEA. The results of each test indicate that skill is an important influence in determining outcomes in poker. Our tests provide a better framework for how courts should analyze the importance of skill in games, and our results suggest that courts should reconsider the legal status of poker.

Immigration enforcement is increasingly integrated with local policing. This trend accelerated four years ago when the federal government launched “Secure Communities,” a program designed to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police. The government views the program as an innovation that enhances the efficacy of crime control and immigration enforcement, while civil rights groups have decried it as an invitation to racial profiling by local police. This paper, part of a larger project providing the first large-scale empirical evaluation of Secure Communities, uses the pattern of the program’s activation to explore a central feature of criminal and administrative law that rarely lends itself to empirical examination — the role of discretion in policing. Constrained by limited resources, the agency staggered the program’s activation across counties, revealing the federal government’s priorities for implementation in the face of competing political and programmatic incentives. The data undercut the government’s claims that the program is all about making communities more secure from crime. Moreover, the fact that early activation in the program correlates strongly with whether a county has a large Hispanic population raises important questions about demographic profiling in immigration enforcement.

Federal investigators must obtain permission from two authorities before wiretapping suspects: first from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and then from a court. The DOJ imposes a higher standard on the use of wiretaps than courts do, and, as a result, all wiretap applications reaching federal judges are legally sufficient and receive judicial approval. In this setting, prosecutors have no incentive to seek review from favorable judges, and a judge’s identity should not correlate with the number of wiretap applications received. The paper tests this prediction using all wiretaps in federal criminal investigations during the years 1997–2007. Consistent with the prediction, judicial characteristics such as ideology and prior professional experience do not influence the number of wiretap applications a judge receives. But African American judges receive substantially fewer wiretap applications, even after numerous judicial and district characteristics are controlled for. The paper investigates several potential explanations for this disparity.

The traditional prosecutor works in an office adjacent to the criminal court, processes a large volume of cases, and measures success with conviction rates and sentence lengths. In the past twenty years, an alternative strategy of prosecution, called “community prosecution,” has emerged. Community prosecution typically involves deploying prosecutors directly in a neighborhood, identifying the community’s public safety concerns by developing close relationships with neighborhood groups, and employing solutions that prevent crime ex ante rather than exclusively bringing prosecutions to punish it ex post. The community prosecution approach has grown rapidly but without any evidence that it improves public safety. This paper presents the first estimates of community prosecutions’ impact on crime. It exploits unique “on/off/on again” variation in the application of community prosecutions in some (but not all) neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois. The paper reports differences-in-differences for numerous offense categories estimated from a panel of police beats observed monthly over nearly seven years. The results indicate that community prosecution reduced certain categories of crime: assaults (both aggravated and simple), robberies, burglaries, and vandalism. Other offense categories appear unaffected by community prosecution. The impacts vary widely by neighborhood, suggesting that community prosecution’s effectiveness may depend highly on the manner of implementation. The estimates suggest that community prosecution as applied in Chicago was cost-justified.

The recent growth of empirical scholarship in law, which some have termed “empirical legal studies,” has received much attention. A less noticed implication of this trend is its potential impact on the manner of scholarly production in legal academia. A common prediction is that academic collaboration rises with scholarly specialization. As the complexity of a field grows, more and more diverse types of human capital are needed to make a contribution. This paper presents two tests of whether empiricism has spurred more co-authorship in law. First, the paper shows that the fraction of articles in the top fifteen law reviews that were empirical or co-authored (or both) trended upwards between 2000 and 2010. The increase in empirical articles accounted for a substantial share of the growth in co-authored articles, and the correlation between co-authorship and empiricism persisted after controlling for numerous other influences. Second, the paper examines the articles published since 1989 in two prominent, faculty-edited journals specializing in law & economics: the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization. Co-authored articles were far more common in these journals than in the general-interest, student-edited law reviews – a pattern which itself is consistent with the specialization hypothesis. The share of articles without empirical analysis or formal models in these journals plummeted over this period, while co-authorship rose sharply. These results support the view that specialization, and specifically the growth of empirical scholarship, has contributed to the trend of co-authorship in legal academia.