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Legislating Incentives for Attorney Representation in Civil Rights Litigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Sean Farhang  and
Douglas M. Spencer
Sean Farhang
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Douglas M. Spencer*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
*
Contact the corresponding author, Douglas Spencer, at [email protected].
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Abstract

Congress routinely relies on private lawsuits to enforce its mandates. In this article, we investigate whether, when it does so, the details of the legislation can importantly influence the extent to which the private bar is mobilized to carry out the prosecutorial function. Using an original and novel data set based on review of archived litigation documents for cases filed in the Northern and Eastern Districts of California over the two decades spanning 1981–2000, we examine the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which increased economic damages available to Title VII job discrimination plaintiffs, on their ability to secure counsel. We find that over the course of the decade after passage, the law substantially increased the probability that Title VII plaintiffs would be represented by counsel and that in doing so it reversed a decade-long trend in the opposite direction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 241 - 271
Copyright
© 2014 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Kevin Clermont, Bert Kritzer, Gwendolyn Leachman, Justin McCrary, J. J. Prescott, Kevin Quinn, Shauhin Talesh, and Abby Wood for helpful comments and suggestions. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, the 2011 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, and the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies colloquium at the Berkeley Law School in 2011. We thank the American Bar Association’s Litigation Research Fund for its generous support of this project.

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