Legal News

Dean Apologizes to Louisiana Supremes for Errors in Law Review Article

By Dan Slater

Tulane Law School is facing an awkward scenario. A professor-written law review article suggesting that the Louisiana Supreme Court justices tend to decide cases in favor of litigants and lawyers who contribute to their campaigns contained “numerous errors,” according to a recent letter of apology sent to the Louisiana Supremes by Tulane Dean Lawrence Ponoroff.

Back in January, the Law Blog noted a then-forthcoming law review article, written by Tulane Prof Vernon Valentin Palmer (pictured). In his column, the NYT’s Adam Liptak cited the article, in which Valentin and his co-author, John Levendis, an econ prof at neighboring Loyola U., examined rulings by the Louisiana Supremes and concluded that, in nearly half of the cases heard by the court over a 14-year period, a litigant or lawyer had contributed to at least one justice. On average, the law review article claimed, justices voted in favor of their contributors 65 percent of the time, and two of the justices did so 80 percent of the time.

(In his NYT article, Liptak cited arguments that dismiss such findings as not showing much except for the fact that “contributors support judges whose legal philosophies they find congenial and, incidentally, sometimes benefit when their judges apply those philosophies in a principled and consistent way that just happens to benefit them.” Law Blog readers were also skeptical of the professors’ conclusions.)

Yesterday, the Times-Picayune published portions of Dean Ponoroff’s apology letter to the Louisiana Supreme Court. “Because of the miscalculation in the underlying data,” wrote the dean, “the reliability of some or all of the authors’ conclusions in the study as published has been called into question.” The letter also said that the law review’s student editors could not have reasonably been expected to be aware of the errors and that Tulane officials “remain disappointed that the authors did not discover them until after the publication.”

In an interview with the Times-Picayune, Professor Palmer, speaking for himself and not Tulane, blamed himself for the errors, including those he found himself and those pointed out by the Supreme Court. Yet with all the mistakes now corrected, he said, the study’s conclusions, broadly speaking, are the same. Palmer said the corrected study data will be verified by an independent researcher and the revised study will probably be republished in a law review, though he didn’t say which law review.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 18, 2008 (boomark / email).