Contributions to law and empirical methods

In this dissertation, which consists of three papers, we demonstrate the benefits of an integration of statistical and legal thinking. In "Potential Outcomes and Causal Effects of Immutable Characteristics," written under the supervision of Professor Donald B. Rubin, we provide a framework for posing and answering well-defined questions regarding the causal effects of race, gender, and other personal traits that have for decades been the focus of civil rights law in the United States. In "R x C Ecological Inference in Voting Rights Litigation," written under the supervision of Professor Kevin Quinn, we develop a new model for assessing voting patterns by race. And in "The Effects of Judicial Assignments on Trial-Level Felony Outcomes: A Pilot Study for Cook County, Illinois," supervised by Professor Xiao-Li Meng and conducted with Charles E. Loeffler, we address a question of interest to those implementing the United States criminal justice system, namely, whether the identity of the judges assigned to felony cases causes differences in trial-level outcomes.