An Email Experiment to Identify the Effect of Racial Discrimination on Access to Lawyers: A Statistical Approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a statistical framework to investigate racial bias in legal assistance requests through email experiments, addressing design complexities and demonstrating methodology despite resource limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical approach for analyzing racial bias in legal access experiments and discusses handling complexities in experimental design and analysis.

Findings

Demonstrated a framework for studying racial bias in legal email responses.

Applied the methodology to a Florida lawyer population, illustrating practical steps.

Identified challenges in executing large-scale experiments due to resource constraints.

Abstract

We consider the problem of conducting an experiment to study the prevalence of racial bias against individuals seeking legal assistance, in particular whether lawyers use clues about a potential client's race in deciding whether to reply to e-mail requests for representations. The problem of discriminating between potential linear and non-linear effects of a racial signal is formulated as a statistical inference problem, whose objective is to infer a parameter determining the shape of a specific function. Various complexities associated with the design and analysis of this experiment are handled by applying a novel combination of rigorous, semi-rigorous and rudimentary statistical techniques. The actual experiment was attempted with a population of lawyers in Florida, but could not be performed with the desired sample size due to resource limitations. Nonetheless, it provides a nice demonstration of the proposed steps involved in conducting such a study.