Empirical Legal Studies

Must Reads & Teaching Empiricism

I teach a seminar on judicial decision-making that focuses on the courts as political institutions, emphasizing the social science literature on the courts.  An issue often batted around by those who teach these judicial behavior courses is what major books should be assigned.  I think two are a must read:

(1) The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited by Segal & Spaeth

(2) The Choices Justices Make by Epstein & Knight

I also like to assign Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope.  

The real difficulty in teaching a judicial behavior course is helping students understand empirical methodologies.  Thus, I asked the following question to a number of colleagues: Can anyone recommend an introductory text for students who are trying to better understand the basic statistics and regression analyses used in the many empirical papers on judicial decision-making?  It seems there are few options.  I received the following suggestions:

• Marija Norusis' SPSS Guide to Data Analysis
• Andy Field’s Discovering Statistics
• Paul Allison's Multiple Regression : A Primer

I have not used any of these, and instead have explained basic statistical analyses using particularly accessible and easy to understand articles.  Does anyone have any other suggestions?  Comments are open.

Who runs the ELS blog?

The ELS blog is a collaborative project produced by Professor Jason Czarnezki  of the Marquette University Law School, Professors Michael Heise and Theodore Eisenberg of the Cornell Law School, and William Ford, Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.  Jason’s research uses empirical methodologies to assess the role of judicial selection, political ideology, and interpretive philosophy on judicial decision-making, as well as analyze the impact of institutional relationships on environmental and administrative law and regulatory policy.  Jason's research can be accessed on his SSRN Author Page.  Michael and Ted co-edit the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.  Michael's research, which can also be accessed via SSRN, focuses on bridging empirical methodologies and legal theory.  Ted is one of the foremost authorities on the use of empirical analysis in legal scholarship, and his research (available on SSRN)  has used innovative statistical methodology to shed light on such diverse subjects as punitive damages, victim impact evidence, capital juries, bias for and against litigants, and chances of success on appeal.  Bill is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, and his research focuses on judicial decision-making, public opinion, and intellectual property.

What is the ELS blog?

This first post is devoted to explaining why we started this web log.  We hope that the ELS blog will advance productive and interdisciplinary discourse among empirical legal scholars. We believe that this blog will be an especially worthwhile addition to legal and academic discourse at this time due to the recent creation of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the emergence of empirical scholarship in the legal academy as evidenced by the 2006 American Association of Law Schools' Annual Meeting topic and empirical scholarship law school rankings, and the mainstream acceptance of web logs as successful means to convey current information of interest to the legal academy. The ELS blog serves as an online forum to discuss and provide links for emerging empirical legal scholarship, provide conference updates, discuss empirical claims that have emerged in public and political discourse, facilitate discussion for guest empirical scholars and assess current empirical findings and methodologies.