Elizabeth Warren - Accusations of Academic Misconduct

Summary

In 1989, Mrs Warren published a book with two other researchers which was the result of a National Sciences Foundation grant and focused on the relationship between consumer credit and personal bankruptcies (Chapter 13). The basic conclusions of the book were that people who declared bankruptcy typically got into a poor financial position because of predatory lending practices and that this led to an increase in bankruptcies. The work has been used as part of the basis for a number of governmental policies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Board that Mrs Warren was placed in charge of in 2009.

When reporters began to investigate Mrs Warren's past, they discovered that numerous scholars raised questions as to the claims made in the research. They asserted that some of the data cited by the report as new was actually old, that the data may not have been gathered or intepreted properly, and that even if the data is correct, it does not support the conclusions reached. Mrs Warren and her co-authors also failed to follow NSF practices documenting their data and were therefore unable to provide their raw data to be verified, leading to charges of scientific misconduct.

To date, three law journals have been found by Breitbart.com that have Professors criticizing both the methodology and the results. A 1990-1991, 60 page, Rutgers Law Review article by Professor Schuchman was the most heavy-handed criticism. It alleged exageratted and outright false claims and asserts that research that the authors claimed as their own is actually not new. The researchers also chose to alter the raw data by replacning personal identifiers, such as names, anonymous numbers. This practice made the data unverifiable and led Mr Shuchman to claim that the authors repeatedly engaged in scientific misconduct.

A second article published by the Indiana Law review noted that Mrs Warren and the other authors characterize the Chapter 13 petititoners as people who 'bought a bill of goods' and 'were cheated'. The author then notes that a number of the cases cited were not closed at the time of publication. The authors then relied on testimony from judges to assert that a large number of the open cases likely failed. The author referred to this data as unimpressive. 

A third article in the Law and Society Review asserted that the data presented by Mrs Warren and the other authors cannot be used to study how people make the decision to file for bankruptcy, because their data set includes only people who actually filed for bankruptcy and excludes those who did not file.

The University of Texas at Austin conducted an investigation into the claim of scientific misconduct by Dr Shuchman. However, the 3 page report did not address the lack of availability of the raw data and Breitbart.com claims that there were five false claims in the report. These false claims include:

1. NSF has subsequently dismissed Shuchman’s complaint
2. Many of the bankruptcy cases were more than ten years old
3. The NSF dismissed the claims
4. To have provided Shuchman with identifying information would have violated the investigators agreement
5. The authors had an agreement with IRB and the NSF to treat the information as confidential. 

 

As We Forgive Our Debtors

The book in question was the result of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and Mrs Warren's co-authors were Teresa A. Sullivan, a Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Texas, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, a Professor of Law at the University of Texas. The official title of the paper was "As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America." The official description from the publisher is shown below.

With the sharp increase in bankruptcies over the past decade and an increasingly wide cross-section of occupational distribution represented, the question treated by this study is both a legal and a sociological one. It does not attempt to study the internal workings of bankruptcy, but the authors look outward to the larger population of bankrupt debtors. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the authors have drawn social and economic portraits of typical debtors against the backdrop of the law and with hard empirical data.

 

Rutgers Law Review

In the 1990-1992 Rutgers Law Review, Professor Philip Shuchman of Rutgers published a critique of the work done by Dr Warren and her co-authors. In this most critical review, Dr Shuchman asserted that the improper manipulation of the data by the authors combined with conclusions not based in the results was the basis for the scientific misconduct charge.

This book contains so much exaggeration, so many questionable ploys, and so many incorrect statements that it would be well to check the accuracy of their raw data, as old as it is. But the authors arranged matters so that they could not provide access to the computer printouts by case, with the corresponding bankruptcy court file numbers, this preventing any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information.

A common instance of misconduct in science occurs when “there [is] no way to verify whether or not [the] research was accurate.’ Woolf, Deception in Scientific Research, 29 Jurimetrics J. 67, 83 table 5 n.4 (1988).

 

Indiana Law Journal

In 1989, Marjorie Girth wrote an article that appeared in the Indiana Law Journal. Mrs Girth is a graduate of Harvard Law School and was a Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The article was titled "The Role of Empirical Data in Developing Bankruptcy Legislation for Individuals," and was highly critical of the method used by Mrs Warren and her coauthors. In a section titled "Conclusions Where Data Appear Invalid or Non-Existent," Girth stated:

Girth sampled a total of 292 separate Chapter 13 petitions from Western New York in 1981. Her results were dramatically different from Warren and her co-authors. She stated in the paper that the methodology used was so weak that the results simply could not be taken seriously.

Because of the methodolgical weakness of Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook data in the Chapter 13 context, bankruptcy policy-makers should not take their negative conclusions about the Chapter 13 alternative seriously.

 

Law and Society Review

Another writer that was critical of the work was University of Michigan economics professor Michele White. In a 1991 article published in the Law and Society Review titled "Economic Versus Sociological Approaches to Legal Research: The Case of Bankruptcy," Dr White asserted that the authors of the paper - including Mrs Warren, were hostile to the principles of economics and again pointed out flaws in the data.

"[The] authors [of this book] are quite hostile to economics, and they attempt to discredit economic models and their predictions."

[T]he type of data collected by Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook cannot be used to study how people make the decision to file for bankruptcy, because their data set includes only people who actually filed for bankruptcy and excludes those who did not file. But the question of how people decide whether to file for bankruptcy is an extremely important one...

Questions of this type cannot be answered using data sets such as Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook's. Their data tell us only the characteristics of people who filed for bankruptcy under the system prevailing at the time they collected their data. It cannot be used to analyze how the number or composition of bankruptcy filings would change if the bankruptcy system itself were to be changed."

 

References

[1] Website: Breitbart.com Article: HARVARD KNEW ELIZABETH WARREN WAS A POOR SCHOLAR WHEN IT HIRED HER Author: Michael Patrick Leahy Accessed on: 09/06/2012

[2] Website: Bretibart.com Article: THE ACADEMIC SCANDAL ELIZABETH WARREN AND HARVARD DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT Author: Michael Patrick Leahy Accessed on: 09/06/2012

[3] Website: Legal Insurrection Article: The vetting of Elizabeth Warren’s academic background begins Author: William Jacobson Accessed on: 09/06/2012

[4] Website: Breitbart.com Article: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS WHITEWASH OF ELIZABETH WARREN SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT CHARGE ENTANGLES UVA, UC PRE Author: Michael Patrick Leahy Accessed on: 09/06/2012

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