Summary judgment and the infield fly rule

No, not together, sadly.

The final version of An Empirical Analysis of the Infield Fly Rule is now on-line at the Journal of Legal Metrics/Journal of Law (the book will be out in a month or so). The article presents the results of a four-year study of all infield fly calls in Major League Baseball. I am extending the study for the 2014 and 2015 seasons, as well as trying to apply some advanced baseball metrics to measure the effect of the rule (or, more precisely, what the effect might be if we did not have the rule and infielders were free to intentionally not catch the ball in search of cost-benefit advantages).

And, completely unrelatedly, Mixed Signals on Summary Judgment is now posted to SSRN, and hopefully coming to a law review near you. Here is the abstract:

This essay examines three cases from the Supreme Court’s October Term 2013 that addressed the standards for summary judgment. In one, the Court affirmed summary judgment against a civil rights plaintiff; in two others the Court rejected the grant of summary judgment against civil rights plaintiffs, arguably for the first time in quite awhile, but in procedurally confounding ways. The essay unpacks the substance and procedure of all three decisions, and considers their likely effect and what signals they send to lower courts and litigants about the proper approach to summary judgment.