J.J.

Prescott

Much of Prescott’s recent scholarship examines how laws and legal institutions shape individual behavior, economic opportunity, and the distribution of legal outcomes. He investigates the expungement process and how clearing criminal records affects employment, wages, and recidivism. He also studies information-disclosure regimes, exploring the tradeoffs involved in using potentially stigmatizing information that may help employers and other decision-makers assess risk but may also be an extremely noisy signal, producing collateral consequences and reducing welfare. In his other criminal justice research, he studies how sex-offender registration and notification regimes affect criminal behavior, recidivism, and public safety, and he analyzes how prosecutorial and judicial decision-making influence case outcomes and disparities. 

Prescott’s research on employment and labor markets gives particular attention to noncompetition agreements and other restrictions on worker mobility. He studies how companies use these provisions in their contracting, what workers believe about their enforceability, and how these agreements—including legally unenforceable ones—shape worker behavior, mobility, and other labor-market outcomes. His litigation research analyzes bargaining, settlement behavior, and the design of dispute-resolution procedures. Prescott also studies how online platforms, artificial intelligence, and other technologies can improve the quality, accessibility, fairness, and efficiency of courts and legal services. Across these projects, he combines administrative and survey data, econometric analysis, experiments, and formal economic modeling.

Prescott’s work has appeared in leading law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review and New York University Law Review, among others, and in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, RAND Journal of Economics, International Economic Review, and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He is co-editor-in-chief of the American Law and Economics Review and Co-Director of both Michigan Law’s Empirical Legal Studies Center and its Program in Law and Economics. He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center.

Prescott’s research regularly receives support from the federal government, foundations and nonprofits, and the University of Michigan. He has secured nearly $5 million in competitive research funding, including multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and recent major awards from the Clean Slate Initiative and the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2020, the University of Michigan selected Prescott to receive its university-wide Distinguished University Innovator Award for his work using technology to make courts more accessible, fair, and efficient. He is the award’s only recipient from the Law School and was its first recipient in a decade from the social sciences. Prescott’s research on access to justice in courts led him to found Court Innovations, Inc., a University of Michigan court-technology startup that developed the Matterhorn online dispute resolution platform. Matterhorn was deployed in dozens of court systems, and Court Innovations was successfully acquired by a private-equity-backed company in 2019.