A few months ago a post requested readers' assistance with identifying examples of what Jim Greiner (Harvard) and Andrea Matthews, a recent HLS grad, have labelled "randomized control trials" in the U.S. legal profession. (The full post is here.) Jim now reports that their effort has resulted in a draft paper, now circulating on SSRN, entitled: Randomized Control Trials in the United States Legal Profession. The paper's abstract follows.
"We assemble studies within a set that we label "randomized control trials ('RCTs') in the United States legal profession," projects that essentially consist of field experiments conducted for the purpose of obtaining knowledge in which randomization replaces a decision that would otherwise have been made by a member of the United States legal profession. We use our assembly of approximately fifty studies to begin addressing the question of why the United States legal profession, in contrast to the United States medical profession, has resisted the use of the RCT as a knowledge-generating device."