layout: page title: Research description: Jon Petkun’s research —
Civilian Harm and Military Legitimacy in War: Evidence from the Battle for Mosul in Iraq”
The legitimacy of armed forces in the eyes of civilians is increasingly recognized as crucial not only for battlefield effectiveness but also for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. However, the micro-determinants of “military legitimacy” are poorly understood. We argue that perceptions of military legitimacy are shaped by two key dimensions of warfare: just cause and just conduct. Leveraging naturally occurring variation during one of the most deadly urban battles in recent history—the multi-national campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq—we evaluate our theory with a mixed-methods design combining original survey data, satellite imagery, and interviews. Civilians living in neighborhoods where armed forces were less careful to protect civilians view those forces as less legitimate than civilians elsewhere. Surprisingly, these results persist after conditioning for personal experiences with harm, suggesting that perceptions are influenced not only by victimization—consistent with previous studies—but also by beliefs about the morality of armed forces’ conduct and the cause for which they are fighting.
The Judicial Administrative Power”
The article clarifies the relationship between judicial administration—the host of non-adjudicatory activities the federal judiciary performs—and Article III adjudication. Today, federal judges and other judicial actors exercise a wide range of administrative powers, ranging from studying, testing, and promulgating rules of court practice and procedure to overseeing federal pretrial detention services or choosing federal public defenders. We show how, over the past century, the federal judiciary has accrued administrative responsibilities largely in the interests of promoting the practical fairness, efficiency, or efficacy of federal adjudication. We then organize the array of judicial administrative activities. When judges and judicial staff engage in judicial administration, they are ordinarily performing one of three actions: they are rulemaking; they are managing; and they are communicating. Based on our descriptive account, we argue that the judicial administrative power carries significant and under-accounted consequences that go far beyond the practical problems of adjudication that gave rise to it. Freed from the formal constraints Article III adjudication, judicial administration upends core notions of what makes the judiciary the judiciary and of how the judiciary ought to relate to its coordinate branches. We therefore conclude with a set of proposed reforms that would redress some of these challenges by treating the judicial administrative power as administrative first and judicial second—not the other way around.
Nudges for Judges: An Empirical Analysis of the “Six Month List”
Recent court reform efforts in the United States have focused on speeding up what is perceived to be a slow and burdensome federal civil justice system. But how is speed best achieved, and at what cost to other goals of the civil justice system? I study a Congressionally-enacted reform known as the “six-month list,” which uses social pressure to incentivize federal judges to decide cases more quickly. After constructing an original dataset of nearly 500,000 federal district court motions—representing the approximate universe of summary judgment motions in federal civil cases for the period 2005-2014—I exploit quasi-random variation in exposure to the six-month list in order to answer two related questions. First, does the six-month list accomplish its ostensible goal of promoting speedier adjudications? And second, how does the six-month list affect the quality of civil adjudications? My results indicate that the six-month list does indeed improve speed; the summary judgment motions that are most exposed to the six-month list are resolved almost a full month (15%) faster than those that are least exposed, and overall case durations are similarly impacted. I also find considerable heterogeneity across judges, with young judges, minority judges, and women judges being among the most responsive to the incentives created by the six-month list. Speedier adjudications notwithstanding, I find only mixed evidence of effects on the quality of adjudications. Finally, estimates from a counterfactual exercise suggest that the six-month list reduces total motion disposition time by approximately 4% relative to a scenario in which the six-month list is eliminated altogether. My results suggest that social pressure and peer perceptions can be key drivers of judicial behavior. I conclude with a discussion of normative implications, including a brief discussion of how the six-month list could be redesigned to capitalize on its best features while minimizing the potential for unintended consequences. In addition to scrutinizing the effects of the six-month list, this article aims to build momentum for a broader empirical research agenda at the intersection of civil procedure and access to justice.
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I Want You! (But Not You): Selection in Military Retention (with Christina Patterson and William Skimmyhorn)
Government workers provide essential goods and services, but how do public sector compensation policies shape workforce quality? We expand the existing literature, which has focused on compensation levels, by studying how the structure of retention incentives affects employee quality in the U.S. military. Combining administrative data with quasi-random policy variation, we find that low-ability soldiers are relatively more responsive to both lump-sum bonuses and early retirement benefits, and both effects are large enough to affect the organization’s average ability level. We provide suggestive evidence that neither access to credit nor differences in personal discount rates explain these selection patterns.