Tulane Law Dean Apologizes to La. Justices for Errors in Study of Donor Influence

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Tulane Law Dean Apologizes to La. Justices for Errors in Study of Donor Influence

Posted Sep 18, 2008, 08:41 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss

The dean of Tulane law school is apologizing to the Louisiana Supreme Court for errors in a professor’s study that had found campaign contributions appear to influence the justices’ votes.

Dean Lawrence Ponoroff said “miscalculation in the underlying data” had called into question the reliability of some or all of the study’s conclusions, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports.

The study was conducted by Tulane law professor Vernon Valentine Palmer with statistical help from an economics professor. It had found that, on average, justices vote in favor of their contributors 65 percent of the time, and that the larger the contribution, the more likely a favorable vote. The study was published in the Tulane Law Review and noted in an article published in the New York Times.

Palmer blamed himself for the errors, but said that when the problems are corrected the study’s conclusions are still the same, broadly speaking, the Times-Picayune story says. He told the newspaper that a revised study will be published in a law review.

Palmer had discovered some of the errors himself and others had been pointed out by the Supreme Court and its defenders.

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