Hillel J. Bavli
Full-time faculty
Associate Professor of Law
Biography
Hillel J. Bavli is an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. His teaching and scholarship interests are primarily in the fields of evidence and torts, and he is particularly interested in applications of statistics to law.
Professor Bavli's current work includes a book on character evidence (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and a large randomized experiment. His scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies and Law, Probability & Risk, as well as in law reviews such as the Iowa Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and U.C. Davis Law Review. He has also been awarded various grants for experimental work, and he recently served as a legal and statistical expert on a government-sponsored panel organized to review and improve proposed standards related to DNA testimony.
An experienced litigation attorney, Professor Bavli has practiced in the fields of complex commercial litigation, antitrust law, and criminal law, most recently at the firms Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. Prior to joining SMU’s faculty, he also designed and taught a seminar course on the economic analysis of law in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He received numerous awards for distinction in teaching for the course.
Professor Bavli received his J.D. from Fordham University School of Law and his Ph.D. in Statistics in Law and Government from Harvard University. He also holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, an A.M. in Statistics from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Economics from Boston University. He completed a Fulbright Fellowship, studying game theory, in Jerusalem, Israel, as well as short-term clerkships at the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of Rwanda. He also held a fellowship at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science and a visiting fellowship at the Yale Law School Center for Private Law.
Areas of Expertise
- Evidence
- Torts
- Procedure
- Law and Statistics
- Law and Economics
Education
J.D., Fordham University School of Law
LL.M., Harvard Law School
A.M., Harvard University
Ph.D., Harvard University
Courses
Evidence
Torts
Law and Statistics
Books
Articles
The Incongruence Principle of Evidence, 99 Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2024)
Character Evidence as a Conduit for Implicit Bias, 56 U.C. Davis Law Review 1019 (2023)
SSRN | SMU Repository
An Objective-Chance Exception to the Rule Against Character Evidence, 74 Alabama Law Review 121(2022)
SSRN | SMU Repository
An Aggregation Theory of Character Evidence, 51 Journal of Legal Studies 39 (2022)
SSRN (Preprint) | The University of Chicago Press (Published version)
Credibility in Empirical Legal Analysis, 87 Brooklyn Law Review 501 (2022)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Causation in Civil Rights Legislation, 73 Alabama Law Review 159 (2021)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Cause and Effect in Antidiscrimination Law, 106 Iowa Law Review 483 (2021)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Counterfactual Causation, 51 Arizona State Law Journal 879 (2019)
SSRN | SMU Repository
The Effects of Comparable-Case Guidance on Awards for Pain and Suffering and Punitive Damages: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial, 37 Yale Law & Policy Review 405 (2019) (with Reagan Mozer)
SSRN | SMU Repository
The Admissibility of Sampling Evidence to Prove Individual Damages in Class Actions, 59 Boston College Law Review 655 (2018) (with John K. Felter)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Shrinkage Estimation in the Adjudication of Civil Damage Claims, 13(2) Review of Law & Economics 1 (2017) (with Yang Chen)
SMU Repository
The Logic of Comparable-Case Guidance in the Determination of Awards for Pain and Suffering and Punitive Damages, 85 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1 (2017)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Sampling and Reliability in Class Action Litigation, 2016 Cardozo Law Review De Novo 207 (2016)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Reductive Sampling: A Framework for Victim Participation and the Reparations Phase of the ICC Trial, 10 Harvard Africa Policy Journal 60 (2015)
Aggregating for Accuracy: A Closer Look at Sampling and Accuracy in Class Action Litigation, 14 Law, Probability & Risk 67 (2015)
SSRN | SMU Repository
Presentations
Selected Recent Presentations
Character Evidence as a Conduit for Implicit Bias, Harvard/Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum, Harvard Law School (June 2022)
Character Evidence as a Conduit for Implicit Bias, Annual Conference of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hong Kong (June 2022)
Character Evidence as a Conduit for Implicit Bias, Evidence Summer Workshop, Vanderbilt Law School (May 2022)
Objective Chance and the Rule against Character Evidence, Evidence Summer Workshop, Vanderbilt Law School (August 2021)
Causation in Civil Rights Legislation, Annual Conference of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Cape Town (June 2021)
Causal Sets in Antidiscrimination Law, Michigan Law School 2020 Junior Scholars Conference, University of Michigan Law School (April 2020)
The Effects of Comparable-Case Guidance on Awards for Pain and Suffering and Punitive Damages: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial, Denver Law Review Symposium: Driven by Data: Empirical Legal Studies in Civil Litigation and Health Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law (February 2019)
Guiding Jurors with Prior-Award Information: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, Cornell Law School (October 2017)
Guiding Jurors with Prior-Award Information: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Annual Meeting of the American Law & Economics Association, Yale Law School (May 2017)