Nancy C. Staudt and Tyler J. VanderWeele have posted this reponse to the Cox and Miles study at the Columbia Law Review Sidebar. Here is the synopsis:

One notable difference between early empirical legal scholarship and the more recent sophisticated contributions to the literature is scholars’ goal of identifying cause and effect relationships. Professors Cox and Miles’s recent study of judicial decisionmaking provides a terrific example of this new-generation work.[1] The authors investigate whether personal attributes such as ideology, race, or gender cause judges to favor (or disfavor) plaintiffs’ claims under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The study is a valuable contribution to the emerging body of empirical scholarship exploring causal relationships, and to the work on judicial decisionmaking and voting rights litigation in particular.[2]
Causal inference, as opposed to making claims about mere correlations, is, of course, an ambitious undertaking. Investigators must spend time and energy exploring the underlying relationship between and among the variables of interest in order to identify possible bias and confounding in their data and, importantly, to address these perceived problems with appropriate conceptual and statistical methods.[3] If bias and confounding exist but are not–or cannot be–remedied, scholars must exercise humility in reporting empirical results: They may point to interesting correlations in the data, but causal claims would be completely unjustified.
In this Response, we use Professors Cox and Miles’s study of judicial decisionmaking to explore what is at stake when legal scholars present empirical findings without fully investigating the structural relationships of their data, or without explicitly stating the assumptions they make in order to draw causal inferences. We do not intend merely to identify the limitations of Cox and Miles’s work (and by implication, those of many other empirical studies published in the extant legal literature); rather, we plan to introduce a new methodology that is intuitive, easy to use, and, most importantly, allows scholars to systematically assess problems of bias and confounding. This methodology–known as causal directed acyclic graphs–will help empirical researchers identify true cause and effect relationships when they exist, and at the same time posit statistical models with appropriate controls, in order to better justify causal claims. While this methodology has become popular in a number of disciplines–including statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and computer science–and is widely believed to be a valuable tool for empirical research, it has yet to appear in the empirical law literature. Accordingly, our goal is to offer a brief introduction of the method and to initiate discussion as to its worth in empirical legal studies.

The Jeff Rosen experience teaches an important lesson for all legal bloggers.

Rob Richie blogs.

The Star Tribune offers this report.

The Washington Times offes this report, which begins: “ustice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.”
See also here.

The NY Times offers this article on Judge Sotomayor, linking to this blog post of mine on the judge’s election law jurisprudence.

The NY Times offers this report on the Texas voter id dispute in the state house this past week.

MPR offers this report about Monday’s hearing before the Minnesota Supreme Court in the Coleman-Franken case. Barring the release of election law opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court, I hope to live blog the oral argument on Monday. I should have an oped on the case also appearing Monday morning in the LA Times.

LIsa Danetz and Fred Wertheimer.
In my view, there is no reason to think Judge Sotomayor’s positions differ in any important way on these questions from the views of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens.

FairVote and the New America Foundation will hold this conference on June 30. See also this newsletter.

Paul Ryan asks.

Via TaxProf blog comes this surprising news.

A must-read for the Vernon junkies on my blog.

Politico has this important article on this 1996 law review article co-authored by Judge Sotomayor. The material discussed in the article is the text accompanying notes 28-30 and 58-60.
As I stressed to the Politico reporter, the article makes clear that as a matter of policy, the judge believes reasonable campaign finance regulation serves important anti-corruption and other interests. But that does not necessarily tell us how the judge would rule as a Justice on the Supreme Court facing campaign finance statutes challenged under the First Amendment. A better way to judge that (though still not perfect, because lower court judges feel more bound to follow existing Supreme Court precedent than sitting members of the Supreme Court do) is to look at how the judge has ruled in election law cases.