About

Sherod Thaxton is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and serves as the Faculty Director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. He holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, as well as in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology at the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences. His teaching includes courses such as Criminal Law, Criminal Adjudication, Federal White Collar Crime, Capital Punishment, and Introduction to Legal Analysis. His scholarship centers on quantitative empirical legal studies with a substantive focus on criminal law, criminal procedure, and the sociology of crime and punishment.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Law
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Monetary economics
• Econometrics
• Mechanical engineering
• Engineering
• Business
• Law and economics
• Visual arts
• Physics
• Meteorology
• Epistemology
• Art

Selected publications

• A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's “Mismatch and Bar Passage: A School-Specific Analysis”

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Engineering
  • Physics
  • Meteorology
  PublisherDOI

• Shrinking the Accountability Deficit in Capital Charging

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Economics

  Abstract The price of capital trials, appeals, and clemency proceedings have skyrocketed since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its moratorium on the death penalty, but this has not translated to more reliable case outcomes—the rate of serious reversible error and wrongful convictions has steadily increased during the same time period. The overly aggressive use of the death penalty by prosecutors has not only been convincingly linked to these high reversal rates, but may also increase crime, decrease the likelihood of arrests for homicides, and lead to heightened risks of miscarriages of justice for non‐capital defendants. It follows that limiting hawkish prosecutorial decision‐making in potentially capital cases may be particularly effective in reducing the prevalence of error and reducing unnecessary expense. Curbing the virtually unfettered discretion of prosecutors is not a new idea, but extant proposals tend to suffer from shortcomings that are likely to render them impractical or ineffective. Any viable legal intervention must increase prosecutorial accountability for inadequate charge‐screening in capital cases while still permitting prosecutors to retain discretion in seeking the death penalty. This essay describes a reform that consists of two primary components: (1) an advisory (i.e., non‐binding) opinion from a reviewing authority assessing the appropriateness of a prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty in a case based on the totality of evidence, and (2) financial and administrative cost-shifting mechanisms capable of disincentivizing prosecutorial overreaching in capital charging.

  PublisherDOI

• Metrics of Mayhem

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Social science has figured prominently in debates over the constitutional administration of capital punishment for more than a half-century, especially with respect to capricious and biased decision-making. The Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia, responsible for ushering in the modern era of capital punishment by invalidating then-existing capital statutes as violative of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, was replete with references to social scientific evidence documenting inconsistent, irrational, and discriminatory capital charging and sentencing practices. Furman contained the most extensive discussion of social science research in any decision up to that point, and all five Justices comprising the per curiam opinion in Furman agreed that evidence identifying the capricious imposition of the death penalty provided sufficient justification to impose an immediate moratorium on executions in the United States and then require the commutation of all death sentences for condemned inmates. Yet the weight given to this empirical evidence (or lack thereof) in judicial decision-making has, itself, been irrational and inconsistent.

  PublisherDOI

• How Not to Lie About Affirmative Action

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  As challenges to race-conscious admissions policies are, once again, advancing through the federal courts, research proclaiming to identify the wideranging effects of affirmative action across a variety of educational settings is influencing this litigation through amici and expert testimony. It is crucial, then, that empirical research used to support claims by parties on either side of the affirmative action debate adhere to the fundamental precepts of causal inference. Yet the literature on causal inference is both vast and dense, and as a result, many judges, lawyers, legislators, and laypersons interested in understanding both the intended and unintended consequences of affirmative action are ill-equipped to understand the debate—especially when quantitative social scientists on both sides of the issue appear to draw conflicting (though not necessarily equally credible) inferences from the same data. The purpose of this Article is to lay bare the core requirements of credible causal inference to the uninitiated, highlighting how inattention to (and sometimes outright disregard for) these rules has muddied the debate over the effect of affirmative action in law schools and in college admissions more generally. The Article empirically examines the six primary deficiencies impacting extant research on affirmative action in law schools: (1) posttreatment bias, (2) nonresponse bias, (3) omitted variable bias, (4) interpolation bias, (5) extrapolation bias, and (6) measurement error bias. I conclude the Article by describing what a scientifically defensible examination of the effect of affirmative action in legal education with currently available data would entail. While no approach to causal inference is infallible, the careful analyst can attempt to ameliorate the impact of these biases.

  Publisher

• Reexamining the link between parental knowledge and delinquency: unpacking the influence of adolescents’ and their parents’ perceptions

  Deviant Behavior · 2018-04-03 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  Parents’ and their children’s perceptions of how much parents know about the child’s activities outside parental presence (parental knowledge) are important for understanding delinquency. Yet, conceptual and methodological deficiencies in prior research may limit this understanding. Reexamining how these perceptions affect delinquency, we find that contrary to conventional wisdom: (1) adolescent and parent perceptions of parental knowledge impact delinquency jointly rather than independently and (2) the protective effect of adolescent perceptions weakens as parent perceptions increase. Specifically, when parental perceptions are strongest, the delinquency inhibiting effect of adolescent perceptions is offset, which may result from stress of parents’ monitoring efforts.

  PublisherDOI

• Reexamining the Link between Parental Knowledge and Delinquency: Unpacking the Influence of Adolescents’ and Parents’ Perceptions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-09-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Parents’ and their children’s perceptions of how much parents know about the child’s activities outside parental presence (parental knowledge) are important for understanding delinquency. Yet, conceptual and methodological deficiencies in prior research may limit this understanding. Reexamining how these perceptions affect delinquency, we find that contrary to conventional wisdom: (1) adolescent and parent perceptions of parental knowledge impact delinquency jointly rather than independently and (2) the protective effect of adolescent perceptions weakens as parent perceptions increase. Specifically, when parental perceptions are strongest, the delinquency inhibiting effect of adolescent perceptions is offset, which may result from stress of parents’ monitoring efforts.

  Publisher

• Disentangling Disparity: Exploring Racially Disparate Effect and Treatment in Capital Charging

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-10-06 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  One hundred and thirty years ago, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially discriminatory enforcement of facially-neutral laws violated defendants ' equal protection rights. Since then, a voluminous body of research has documented persistent and unjustified racial disparities in charging and sentencing. Yet not a single claimant has prevailed in a race-based discriminatory prosecution action in federal court since Yick Wo. This seeming conflict-widespread evidence of racial discrimination coupled with claimants' inability to satisfy the Courts' evidentiary thresholds to prevail on the discriminatory prosecution claim can be attributed to deep disagreements among the Supreme Court Justices over a uniform and workable evidentiary standard for social scientific evidence of discrimination. Although the Court has increasingly signaled its willingness to rely. on statistical evidence to demonstrate racial discrimination, the majority of Justices have simultaneously found such evidence lacking in particular cases and failed to specify what types of evidence would be sufficient. Recently, members of the Court most skeptical of statistical evidence of discrimination have emphasized that claimants must show racial differences in outcomes are connected to racial differences in process, and not merely that there was an opportunity for discriminatory decision-making. This article contributes to the understanding of discriminatory prosecutorial charging behavior by carefully disentangling the racial disparity into two separate components: the part that is explained by racial differences in case characteristics predictive of the charging decision (disparate effect) and the part explained by the racial differences in prosecutors' behavioral response to those characteristics (disparate treatment). By way of illustration, I apply the analytical approach to data on capital charging decisions in Georgia. I discover that between 60%-80% of the race-of-victim gap in capital charging behavior in Georgia is attributable to disparate treatment. I further show how prosecutors' differential treatment of specific case characteristics based on the victim's race contributes to the overall racial disparity, thereby providing a more granular analysis of discriminatory decision-making than previously available. I conclude by discussing the legal implications of my findings in light of the Court's governing equal protection and anti-discrimination jurisprudence.

  Publisher

• When Criminal Coping is Likely: An Examination of Conditioning Effects in General Strain Theory

  Journal of Quantitative Criminology · 2017-07-03 · 100 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Criminal Coping is Likely: An Examination of Conditioning Effects in General Strain Theory

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-10-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Objectives: This paper addresses perhaps the central problem in General Strain Theory (GST): the mixed results regarding those factors said to condition the effect of strains on crime. We test Agnew’s (2013) assertion that a criminal response to strain is likely only when individuals score high on several factors that increase the propensity for criminal coping or possess markers that indicate a strong propensity for criminal coping. Methods: We use survey data from nearly 6,000 juveniles from across the United States to examine whether the effect of criminogenic strains across several domains—perceptions of police, school environment, and victimization—on crime are conditioned by: (1) respondents’ criminal propensity and (2) gang membership. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first criminological study to employ an analytical framework that simultaneously considers non-linear (i.e., curvilinear) dynamics, non-additive (i.e., interactive) effects, and non-normally distributed dependent variables. This approach has the advantage of properly differentiating non-linear and non-additive dimensions and therefore significantly improving our understanding of conditioning effects. Results: We find considerable support for Agnew’s (2013) postulation about conditioning effects and GST. Criminal behavior is more likely among those with a strong overall propensity for criminal coping and among gang members. Furthermore, we discover that the conditioning effects are, themselves, non-linear. Our models that simultaneously take into account both the non-additive and non-linear relationship between strains and criminal propensity on their impact on criminal offending better fit the data than models that consider these dimensions separately. These results hold whether examining a composite measure of criminal activity or, alternatively, three separate subscales indexing violent, property, and drug offenses. Conclusion: Our study advances GST and the crime literature by identifying the types of strained individuals most likely to engage in criminal coping. Additionally, the analytical framework employed serves as a model for the correct measurement and interpretation of conditioning effects for criminological data, which almost invariably violate the assumptions of the linear regression model. Linear/Parametric interactions are the most commonly investigated type of interactions, but other kinds of interactions are also plausible and may reveal conditional relationships that are either overlooked or understated when analysts exclusively adopt. We demonstrate possible to have non-linear interactions in which a non-linear function of one variable is multiplied by a linear or non-linear function of one or more other variables to produce an interaction term.

  Publisher

• Un-Gregg-ulated: Capital Charging and the Missing Mandate of Gregg v. Georgia

  Duke journal of constitutional law & public policy · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  LawInstitute On the Matter of the Death Penalty (2009).This framework, described in 210.6 of the ALI's Model Penal Code, both set forth the procedure for imposing a death sentence, Model Penal Code 210.6(1)-( 2), and provided a list of aggravating, Model Penal Code 210.6(3)(a)-(h), and mitigating factors, Model Penal Code 210.6(4)(a)-(h), for judges and juries to consider when sentencing convicted capital defendants.2. Id.3. Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).Georgia's capital statute provided a list of aggravating factors, but not mitigating factors.Under the Georgia scheme, any constitutionally permissible mitigation evidence could be considered by the sentencing authority.The distinction between death penalty statutes providing enumerated mitigating factors and those, like Georgia, that did not list mitigating factors would become immaterial because two years later the Court would soon rule that death penalty defendants were allowed to permit any constitutionally permissible mitigation evidence.See

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Robert Agnew

  10 shared

• Cesar J. Rebellon

  George Mason University

  7 shared

• Jessica M. Grosholz

  University of South Florida Sarasota–Manatee

  6 shared

• Heather L. Scheuerman

  James Madison University

  6 shared

• Alex R. Piquero

  University of Miami

  4 shared

• Deena A. Isom

  University of South Carolina

  4 shared

• Lesley Watson

  American Cancer Society

  4 shared

• Nicole Leeper Piquero

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics
• Academy of Achievement student honoree
• Public Interest Law Prize recipient
• Soros Justice Postgraduate Fellow at the Open Society Instit…
• Law and Social Science Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar F…