Intuitive lawmaking: The example of child support

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work, we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways from these two systems: Our respondents favored child support amounts that are more responsive to the NCP's income and much more responsive to the CP's income than set by either system. They also favored dollar amounts that increase more rapidly with NCP income when CP income is lower, producing a characteristic fanning lines pattern when dollar support amounts are charted against NCP income for several different CP incomes. We give the label "Fair Shares" to these two features of our respondents' child support judgments. We describe six new experimental studies that vary the context of these judgments in ways that test whether the "Fair Shares" account is robust. Our studies consistently replicate the fan-shaped pattern and shed further light on lay judgments.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We examine how ordinary citizens translate intuitions about child welfare and distributive justice into dollar amounts for post-divorce child support payments. Our analyses indicate that child support judgments are quite sensitive to anchoring and question-wording effects. Nevertheless, we find much that is both interpretable and principled in these judgments. For example, the amounts that citizens recommended in an open-ended format ("name") were nearly identical to the amounts other citizens selected from an array of choices in a multiple choice format

Law and Human Behavior, 2012

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various principles that might be called upon to explain legal judgments about the appropriate amount of child support to require in individual cases. These items were derived from extant systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. These items were found to coalesce into four factors, three of which corresponded roughly with the principles that Theory endorsed. There were pervasive gender differences in respondent's endorsement of the principles. Three of these four principles abstracted from the item responses were systematically reflected in the respondents' resolution of individual child support cases they were asked to decide. Differences among respondents in their endorsement of these three principles explained much of the variance among them in their child support judgments. It is suggested that the pattern of coherent arbitrariness in those support judgments, noted in an earlier study ) is thus partially explained, in that the seeming arbitrariness of respondents' initial support judgments reflect in part their differing views about the basic principles that should decide the cases.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Given the fact that the child and custodial parent generally share a living standard, there is some tension between the traditional rule excluding marital status altogether as a consideration in setting child support levels, and the traditional American rule making marriage an absolute requirement in claims by one spouse against the other for support (traditionally, 'alimony') for herself. How should that tension be resolved? This paper is part of a larger project investigating how ordinary citizens resolve such policy problems, by asking them to decide a series of cases that systematically vary critical facts so as to reveal the underlying principles animating their views. This study extends the authors' prior child support studies by a) expanding the range of paternal incomes presented to respondents, and b) examining the effect of the parents' marital status and relational duration. We replicate our prior findings on the impact of parental incomes, and the disparity between them, across the expanded income range, and the finding that overall, citizens favor higher support amounts than the law provides when custodial parent income is low, but lower support amounts when the custodial parent income is higher. We also now find that our respondents would increase support awards for low income mothers (over current levels) by larger amounts when parents had married, than when they had cohabited, and would give the lowest awards to mothers who had had no relationship at all with the father, beyond the single sexual act leading to the child's conception. We explain why the pattern of their support awards suggests that in setting child support levels they give more weight than current American law to the children's interests.

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1992

Recent U S . federal legislation required states to establish mandatory judicial guidelines for the setting of child-support awards. An equivalence-based approach is used to compare three formulae (two in use, one proposed) to three theoretical benchmarks, to clarifi, unavoidable trade-offs in the choice of a guideline." Since the economic well-being of children cannot be separated from that of their custodial parent, that which most privileges children's welfare will usually privilege the custodial parent over the absent parent, and what appears more fair between the two adults may be less favorable to the children. Another possible trade-off is between children's welfare and work incentives: The guidelines that prescribe larger awards are those with higher implied marginal tax rates. Despite their work disincentive effects, the formulae with higher marginal tax rates are more favorable to children's economic interests.

Choices, Values, and Frames

An important idea, which characterizes law in society, is a reluctance to move from the status quo. In general, one can argue that legal institutions and legal doctrine are not engaged in the redistribution of wealth from one party to another. This paper explores a possible explanation for that principle. The authors' research suggests that, across a wide range of entitlements and in a variety of contexts, individuals value losses more than foregone gains. The paper argues, as a matter of efficiency, that law and social policy might have developed in a manner consistent with this valuation disparity. Furthermore, this valuation disparity can be transformed into conceptions of fairness, and, as a matter of fairness, legal decisions might have developed in a manner consistent with this fairness norm. In the first part of the paper, the economic and psychological research on the valuation disparity is described in detail. The paper then examines a series of legal doctrines, all of which can be explained by the valuation disparity phenomenon revealed in the experimental data. Cohen and Knetsch conclude that the behaviour of legal institutions and actors can be explained by thevaluation disparity.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This paper is part of a larger series of studies that have examined this question by asking what citizens believe the law should demand, using surveys of persons called to jury service in Tucson, Arizona. Respondents are asked to imagine they are the judge charged with deciding a series of cases in which the facts are systematically varied so as to reveal the implicit principles survey respondents employ in deciding them. Previously reported results in this project have examined studies of the amount of the child support people believe appropriate, and how they believe child custody disputes should be resolved. This study examines lay views about alimony. It finds considerable divergence between American law in practice, and the views of American citizens as to what the law should be.

Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the anti-terrorist military practice of targeted killings, which has been an issue of legal debate. Our experimental findings suggest that proportionality judgments are receptive to normatively relevant facts. We also find strong correlational evidence for the effect of ideological preferences on such judgments, but no indication that information processing was systematically biased. These results are consistent for two versions of proportionality doctrine. We suggest that proportionality judgment is anchored jointly in the experts' policy preferences and the facts of the case. We outline the implications of the findings for the psychological and legal literature.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.