Community Characteristics and Tort Law: The Importance of County Demographic and Inequality to Tort Trial Outcomes

Abstract

Long-standing trial folklore holds that those counties with higher proportions of low-income and minority residents are places where tort plaintiffs are more likely to prevail in establishing the defendant’s liability and to recover high damages. Although a handful of empirical legal studies have looked at this question, none have considered the possible role of a community effect of county income inequality. This paper tests these propositions with hierarchal linear models of two types of tort trial outcomes, plaintiff success in establishing defendant liability and damage award, using a number of county-level predictors. The results show that no county-level variables measuring jury pool demographic composition or income inequality are associated with the odds of plaintiff success. However, both county poverty rate and income inequality are associated with increased levels of expected damages. The final section of this paper offers a substantive theoretical discussion of why we might observe a relationship between community characteristics and tort trial outcomes.

Keywords: Tort law, empirical legal studies, inequality, law and society