Online Journal | Genevieve Goetz | January 2024
What made you initially interested in studying economics?
“Well, I was an undergraduate at Wash U in St. Louis and I started studying physics. But I quickly realized that that wasn’t really human-related enough for me. And so I wasn’t really sure what I was gonna do, but I was really good at math. And my dad just suggested to me, why don’t you check out econ? And I was like, okay, sure, I didn’t really know what it was about. Took a few classes and kinda never went back.”
You have a demonstrated interest in law. Are there any reasons you chose getting a PhD in economics over going to law school?
“Yeah, I actually thought a lot about going to law school. My undergrad degree is in economics. I didn’t really take any law classes as an undergrad. I come from a family of lawyers; My dad’s a lawyer, my sister is a lawyer. I’ve thought about it and I looked into if there were any ways of getting both an econ PhD and a JD. But at the time I was going to grad school, there weren’t that many, there were a couple options, but there weren’t that many. Now there are actually more. So I ended up just choosing econ, because that’s what I really wanted to do over law school and figured maybe if I want to do law school, I could do it later on. If I were doing it all over again, I’d probably really try to get a JD at the same time. If I could find a program that was suitable.”
Do you see yourself going back and getting a law degree?
“This question comes up a lot. I would love to, I think it’d be really intellectually stimulating. I don’t think that it would add much value to my research, because I think I’ve kind of learned all of the law and can learn all of the law that I need to on my own. So like, at this point in my career, I’m probably just as good at finding the information on my own. The real reason to do it would be if I wanted to practice law, so leave academia and do something more practice-based, or if I wanted to actually teach in a law school. To get a faculty position in the law school, it’s a lot easier if you have a JD and they really don’t want to hire people who don’t have JDs. I still think about it every couple of years. I think about if I want to do it, but it’s a huge cost. So I haven’t actually done it yet and maybe time’s running out. But we’ll see.”
Much of your research centers around market design, micro economic theory, and jury selection and peremptory challenges. Why do you gravitate towards these topics specifically?
“I got my PhD here at Madison and my training– well, you specialize in getting your PhD into a certain field and that’ll end up helping determine who your advisors are and who you’re working with – and my broad field was just microeconomic theory. I’m more interested in individual decision makers, rather than governments and big decision makers, so I’m into micro theory.
And then I got into econ and really interested in – I mean, I knew nothing about economics – but I was very interested in just this idea of how do we allocate things, like how do we decide who gets what. And it turns out, with econ theory, we know really, really well how to allocate things using prices and markets when all of our conditions are satisfied for a price at market. And in my opinion, there’s less interesting research in that area now. We’ve kind of solved those problems. It’s interesting to think about what happens when all of our conditions aren’t satisfied, which is true, they’re not going to be satisfied. And it’s good to think about different ways to model price-setting markets. But I got really interested in how to allocate goods that you can’t use prices for. Like my matching market stuff, matching markets tend to be markets where we really just aren’t allowed to use prices for whatever reason. So like matching my students to positions in schools or organs to people receiving organs, where for various ethical, moral, social norm, legal reasons, you’re just not allowed to use prices.
My interest in law matched with my interests in markets where you can’t use prices is what led me into studying juries. It’s another market where you’re allocating the scarce resources, spots on a jury, but you’re not allowed to use prices. You have to figure out different mechanisms to set up. What’s also very interesting about it is that there are really, really, really clear rules about how it’s supposed to work and how it does work. And so it’s really easy to model because I feel less just like I’m making it up on my own and more just following, “Oh, here’s what the law says. This is what the rules are.” So I can model it very clearly.”
Going off of the jury duty and research interests specifically: your research on North Carolina jury selection has shown that peremptory challenges may be discriminatory on the basis of race and gender, and that these challenges can have impacts on conviction outcomes. Could you elaborate more on these findings and their impacts?
“Peremptory challenges are vetoes that attorneys get when they’re choosing who ends up on a jury. The history of it – they’re not something that’s constant. You have a constitutional right to an impartial jury, that’s your sixth amendment right. And what impartiality means, that’s come out in the case law, is that individual jurors are supposed to be unbiased. So, you’re not supposed to determine the outcome of a case based on anything except for the evidence presented at trial. The full jury is supposed to be some sort of representative cross section of society, there’s like the so-called “jury of your peers.” Although “jury of your peers” is not actually the exact definition of what it means, it’s supposed to come from a cross section of society. So, in this process, jurors are randomly selected from the population and then jurors are eliminated if they’re demonstrably biased. Like you say, “You know, I hate this person, I’m going to vote for them guilty no matter what,” or, “I know this person,”or something like that. But then this other way of eliminating Jurors is peremptory challenges. Historically, the purpose of them is to allow attorneys to use their own expertise to eliminate biased jurors. The idea is like, you know, attorneys know more than the system does, they’re in the system, they can use some expertise, shape the jury into some sort of fair representative jury, we give each side challenges and so it’s balanced and we end up with a less biased jury in theory. The only rules about peremptory challenges are that you’re not supposed to use them based on race, or gender. Those are the only rules. Those are the 14th amendment, equal protection of those restrictions on using peremptory challenges. So, in my research, I have data on the race and gender of prospective jurors and I can see how they were challenged by either side. And it’s very, very clear that attorneys are targeting people based on their race or gender. The paper you’re talking about is from North Carolina and in North Carolina most of the jurors are either black or white, that’s just how the demographics of the population are. And the pattern is very much that the prosecutors, the people who are trying to convict defendants, challenge black prospective jurors and the defense attorneys, the people who are trying to defend, challenge white prospective jurors more often. Because of the demographics and how there are fewer black prospective jurors in the population because they’re a minority, even though challenges are sort of balanced, that ends up reducing the actual seated number of black jurors on a jury, which then adds up significantly changing the conviction rate and making it so that the conviction rate is much higher than it would be otherwise without these challenges.”
So you’ve discovered this, do you have any stance on what steps should be taken to mitigate or eliminate discriminatory practices in jury selection?
“So first, I would say, you’re never going to be able to stop someone from using race, as a reason for challenging a prospective juror as long as they have the option to. The history of how these challenges work– you’re not supposed to use race or gender to use as a reason for a peremptory challenge. So, there are supposed to be these checks and balances set up where you can challenge a challenge. So if I’m an attorney and I think that someone has used a peremptory challenge improperly, because they’ve done it based on race or gender, I can propose what’s called a Batson challenge. Batson was the original case that established that you weren’t allowed to use race as a means for these challenges. So you can say, “I’m going to do a Batson challenge. I want to say that this person, my opposing counsel, challenged this juror because of their race or gender,” and then the judge has to accept whether or not they’re going to hold out the Batson challenge. Usually they do and then the next step is you just ask the opposing counsel for some other reason why they used the challenge. Because literally any other reason [than race or gender] is an okay reason to do the challenge, these Batson challenges are almost never successful. Someone can say, “Hey, you know, the prosecutor challenged this prospective juror because they’re black,” and the prosecutors say, “No, it wasn’t because they’re black. It was because they were wearing the color red and I know that that’s associated with anger and I don’t like that.” You know, it can be totally, totally BSed things. So, there is no way of getting around how the system is set up right now. There’s just no good way to eliminate the fact that as long as there’s any incentive to make racist or gender-based challenges, people are going to do it.
So, one solution is just get rid of primary challenges. And that’s a lot. That’s what a lot of people propose doing and the state of Arizona has done that. So, there’s one place in the country that does not allow peremptory challenges anymore, Arizona, and that just happened last year. So we’re going to see how that shakes out over time. And the other way I would suggest would be– I actually have a paper right now, so, this gets into any questions about upcoming research –where I propose a new mechanism that, rather than challenging individual jurors, you’d basically bring in a pool of prospective jurors and pull random full juries from that pool and present those to attorneys and allow them to challenge the full juries. To prove this, there’s a bit more going on behind the scenes. But basically, in my paper, I showed that if you do this in a very particular way, you can make it so that even if attorneys are challenging people based on their race or gender, it won’t actually distort the outcome in the way that challenging individual jurors does. So you can’t get rid of the racist challenges necessarily, but you can mitigate the effects if they are challenging for that reason.”
That kind of covers the last question regarding your future research. My question now would be how far along are you in that research?
“So that one paper that I have is in the revise and resubmit stage at a journal. So, they have suggestions about how to change it, I’m currently doing my edits, and hopefully I’ll be sending it back out to them very soon. Then, my next-next research would be that I have a data set that I built that I haven’t really used to study these things from Minnesota, that took me several years to build. It’s still kind of sitting waiting for me to submit this paper so we can move on to that. That data does not have information about race, unfortunately. But what it does have that’s interesting, that’s different than other data that I’ve worked on, is information about education level and profession and jobs. So you can see how challenges are being used based on level of education and work and class.”
Do you have anything else you want to add or that you want included in the article?
“If anybody’s interested in talking about research with me, just send me some questions and that would be great!”