FACULTY
Faculty Profile
Full-time Faculty
Dane R. Thorley
Professor of Law
Professor Thorley is a legal empiricist who’s work covers a number of substantive areas, with a particular focus on how the rules, procedures, and practices currently utilized in the US courtroom impact the behavior of judges, attorneys, and parties and how that behavior then influences the implementation and efficacy of those rules.
He has published (or has forthcoming work) in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science, as well as in law reviews such as the Harvard Law Review and the Northwestern University Law Review. His publications and working projects explore judicial recusal, judicial campaign finance, the use of technology in courtrooms, parole hearings, warrant review, bail hearings, immigration, online consumer protection regulation, cruel and unusual punishment, free speech, and the interplay between empiricism and rights balancing tests.
In exploring these issues, he employs his training as a field experimentalist to conduct empirical evaluations that are both informed by the realities of the legal system and methodologically rigorous. He is passionate about the growing role that randomized field experiments (often called randomized controlled trials, or RCTs) should play in the study and development of law, procedure, and policy and has work addressing the methodological and ethical difficulties of running field experiments or utilizing randomization in the context of law and courts.
Professor Thorley earned a JD ('17) from Yale Law School, a PhD (’19), a MPhil (’17) and MA (’15) in Political Science from Columbia University, and a BS (’12) in Political Science and Korean from Brigham Young University. Prior to joining the faculty at BYU Law School, he clerked for Judge Andrew Gordon in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada.
Additional Information
- Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Review in Search and Seizure, 138 Harv. L. Rev. 1959 (2025) (with Miguel de Figueiredo and Brett Hashimoto).
- Them's Fightin' Words – Maybe: Testing the Application and Boundaries of the “Fighting Words” Doctrine Using a Randomized Survey Experiment, 50 BYU L. Rev. 1667 (2025) (with Erin Cranor).
- The Failure of Judicial Recusal and Disclosure Rules: Evidence from a Field Experiment, 117 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1277 (2023) (peer reviewed).
- Pretrial Disparity and the Consequences of Money Bail, 81 Maryland L. Rev. 557 (2022) (with Miguel de Figueiredo).
- Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure: A Field Experiment, 83 J. Politics 4 (2021) (peer reviewed) (with Jonathon Krasno, Donald Green, Costas Panagopoulos, and Michael Schwam-Baird).
- Compliance Experiments in the Field: Features, Limitations, and Examples, in Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Daniel Sokol and Benjamin Van Rooij, eds.) (invited chapter) (2021).
- Randomness Pre-considered: Recognizing and Accounting for “De-Randomizing” Events When Utilizing Random Judicial Assignment, 17 J. Emp. Legal Stud. 342 (2020) (peer reviewed).
- Trial by Skype: A Causality-Oriented Replication Exploring the Use of Remote Video Adjudication in Immigration Removal Proceedings, 59 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 82 (2019) (peer reviewed) (with Joshua Mitts).
- Field Experimentation and the Study of Law and Policy, 10 Ann. Rev. L. Social Sci. 53 (2014) (peer reviewed) (with Donald Green).