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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Times comes clean about flawed report

By Mark Obbie

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When Adam Liptak's Sidebar column gave national exposure to a new Tulane Law Review study last January, it set off much blog chatter and followup articles elsewhere. This month, with Sidebar still on hiatus and Liptak busily diving into his new Supreme Court beat after moving to D.C., some might forgive him if he ignored an inconvenient fact: the law review has repudiated the study that Liptak based his story on. Here's how the standard journalistic copout would go: It wasn't our error. We were right when we reported on what the study said. And that was a long time ago. Not our problem.But Liptak and his editors deserve praise for considering it their problem. They remember whom they serve: their readers. The Times thought the study believable and important enough to inform readers of it, and now has a duty to correct the record. Especially given the point of the Tulane study, which supposedly documented a cause-and-effect link between campaign contributions to Louisiana Supreme Court justices and the outcomes in particular cases. The study practically damned the court as corrupt. Liptak's column on the study was restrained in tone, but clearly credulous about what the study's data showed. Months later (the Times only says it was recent, and Tulane doesn't say on its site when it was added) came this note on the home page of the Tulane Law Review, titled with the weasely "Erratum" rather than the plainer "Correction":

The Louisiana Supreme Court in Question: An Empirical Statistical Study of the Effects of Campaign Money on the Judicial Function published in Volume 82 of the Tulane Law Review at 1291 (2008), was based on empirical data coded by the authors, but the data contained numerous coding errors. Tulane Law Review learned of the coding errors after the publication. Necessarily, these errors call into question some or all of the conclusions in the study as published. The Law Review deeply regrets the errors.

Not exactly a model of transparency. But it was enough to prompt an an editor's note today in the Times (also attached to the original article online). It started by reminding readers what the original report was about. It continued:

The law review recently posted a note on its Web site saying the study was based on flawed data that called its conclusions into question. Vernon Valentine Palmer, the study’s principal author and a law professor at Tulane, acknowledged the errors, but said the corrected data appear to continue to support the study’s general conclusions. He also said that he was seeking an independent review of the study.

So it's a bit of a followup story, and mostly a disclosure to readers that what we once relied on we can no longer trust. Why not call it a correction? Close call, but without conducting its own intense data-driven study, how can the Times declare the Tulane article actually false? All it knows is that it may be false. And that's what it's told its readers. Now, how many bloggers who enthusiastically jumped on the story thanks to Liptak's report will do the same?

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 20, 2008 (boomark / email).