Empirical Legal Studies

New ICPSR Data Releases

Here.  Three datasets that caught my eye:

• 20580 Capital Punishment in the United States, 1973-2005

• 4714 Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data [United States]: Arson, 2005

• 2956 [Update] Immigrants Admitted to the United States, 1998

Communicating across the divide

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the "great divide" between legal academics and political scientists.  Even today, with many avenues for communication between these fields -- like this very blog -- there is less than one might expect.  Certainly, there are many in both fields who read and talk across the divide, and I'd expect that many readers of this blog are among those.  But there remains the puzzle of why this is the exception and not the rule.

One possible reason has to do with substantial differences in the norms of scholarship in the different fields.  Articles in the social sciences in general tend to be much shorter than law review articles, and more narrowly focused.  They are also more likely to involve quantitative empirical analysis and to emphasize methodology.  Law review articles, on the other hand, are notoriously long, but a single piece can explore a variety of theories and themes and is often focused on the broader implications of legal opinions, events, or analysis.   As a result of these differences -- and leaving aside criticisms of the underlying content of the scholarship -- I think that legal academics often find social science pieces either opaque or -- due to their narrow focus -- uninteresting.  On the flip side, of course, social scientists often find law review articles tedious and imprecise. 

The increasing interest in empirical legal scholarship in the legal academy may help temper some of these tendencies, but there is a long way to go.   Scholars in both legal academia and in the social sciences could go much further in trying to make their work understandable to people outside their own field.  As but one example, I'll hold out the recent work of Thomas G. Hansford & James F. Spriggs II.  Their book, The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court explores the ways that justices use precedent.  The book is ambitious and quite interesting.  Its argument and conclusions, however, are not written in ways designed to get the attention of legal scholars who are not themselves engaged in empirical work, despite the fact that at least some of those conclusions may be interesting to qualitative scholars of the Supreme Court.   In a thumbnail review in the Law Library Journal, for example, the reviewer dismissed the book as "better suited for a political science class than a legal audience..."  The book itself contains a lot of sophisticated statistical analysis that is not translated for those who might not be familiar or comfortable with that methodology, and it assumes familiarity with political science norms and resources (the Spaeth Supreme Court databases, for example).  All of this is unfortunate because it makes it less likely that the work will be read (much less understood) by most legal scholars.  And to reiterate the point of my italics above --  this is especially unfortunate to the extent that the Hansford and Spriggs' findings would be interesting to the many law professors who are not themselves empirical legal scholars, but who study the Supreme Court from other perspectives.

So what to do?  More co-authorship would be helpful.  More self-consciousness about the ways in which the norms of one field may exclude or deter readers from another.  I'd be particularly interested in seeing different presentations of the same work in different settings.  Hansford and Spriggs, for example, might consider a law review article that presents their work to a legal academic audience.  (Of course, they may already be doing this.)  With apologies to Hansford and Spriggs, I hope that this blog post helps nudge social scientists and legal academics alike towards learning to speak a bit of each others' languages.

CELS Conference Paper Selections & Tentative Schedule

For anyone interested, a tentative CELS conference schedule is available at the CELS Conference website (this year hosted at NYU and found here).  Individual paper discussant assignments will be made, and posted, promptly.

Zaring on why are economists are so great

Over at Conglomerate, David Zaring (formerly a W&L law professor, now at Wharton) expands upon Greg Mankiw's observations on the sociology of economics, including musing on why economists are (or come off as) so great.  Here is an excerpt:

[T]here’s no question that economists are well trained social scientists, with plenty of math and a confident professional ethos. Economists are also good in workshops – and I occasionally think that the old law professor credo of “have a theory about anything and speak in full paragraphs rich with prosody” is less popular in the interdisciplinary seminar rooms of our universities now that economists are coming too, and biting into the confounders and omitted variables. ...

Economists may crush all comers in seminars, Mankiw thinks, because "economics may attract people with a particular set of personality attributes, and perhaps these attributes are not the same set of attributes you might choose for your next dinner party.”

Mankiw's original post also contains this nugget:

[T]he set of advocates who are economists is quite small (I don't know if this reflects treatment or selection). In general, economists are more likely to make up their minds about whether a particular policy works based on theory or data. They may have priors, but not the the sort of "do-gooder"priors that advocates have. One of the reasons that economists are so aggressive with the non-economists is that we want to expose all the priors immediately.

I love this statement, at least as an aspiration.  Of course, as noted in one recent critique of economists (see "Economics is a 'Triumph of Theory Over Fact'"), it is also possible to be so in love with your theory that you dismiss any need to test its most basic assumptions.   

Today's WSJ Op-Ed, "Mismatch" Hypothesis, and ELS Blog Forums

Today's WSJ Op-Ed page includes an essay (regrettably, a direct link is not possible w/out a  subscription) that relates to a recent ELS Blog Forum featuring work by Richard Sander (UCLA) and responses to that work by Richard Lempert (Michigan).

Teaching Evaluations from a Practicing Lawyers' Perspective

This year, I was fortunate to an organizer of the 6th Annual ISBA Solo & Small Firm Conference.   In wrapping up the conference and preparing for next year, one of our first tasks was to review the speaker evaluations generated by a SurveyMonkey.com questionnaire--and note, I was one of the speakers.

Although there is a controversy within the academy on whether teacher evaluations can be trusted, my colleagues at the ISBA had no problem using these scores to make future programming decisions.  Note that the organizers attended a large proportion of the sessions (and a few of us were also presenters); the evaluations seems to confirm our own impressions of speaker quality.   There were no surprises.  (Disclosure: my own evaluations were good but not spectacular.)

I got the impression that the ISBA approached the situation in the same way as any business trying to improve its product:   Each speaker got a copy of his or her scores plus excerpts from the narrative comments; many will be invited back, but a few will not.   Frankly, after reflecting on this experience, I think some of the academic debates on the value of student evaluations (see, e.g., this bibliography) would be ridiculed by practicing lawyers who are used to delivering value or losing a client.    Virtually all lawyers involved in the conference would agree that the consensus view of their colleagues is what matters.  This is a very pragmatic approach that is hard to dismiss.

If the judgment of lawyers can be trusted, what about law students?  In an earlier post, I defended the validity of law school teaching evaluations.  A recent article by Deborah Jones Merritt, "Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations," has the right idea:  Refine the teacher evaluation process and improve its validity.  But don't make the leap that the quality of legal instruction cannot be measured.

Another Gift to Marquette Law School: $30 Million

This past May I posted about a $51 million gift to the Marquette University Law School toward construction of a new facility.  Now, while the ELS Blog rarely posts off-topic news, this additional news promises to be another important moment for the Marquette University Law School.

Joseph J. Zilber, Milwaukee philanthropist, real estate developer and Chairman of the Board of  Zilber Ltd., a real estate holding company, announced a $30 million gift to the Marquette University Law School.  The University press release is here and here.  Mr. Zilber, who graduated from the Marquette University Law School in 1941, has directed that $5 million of the gift be used to support construction of the Law School and that $25 million be associated with law student scholarships.

Academic Blogs & Bloggers & Value-Adding

In something of a throw-away line in a recent post describing the birth of a new blog over at PrawfsBlawg Ethan Leib remarks: "... what academic bloggers can do well: actual commentary on scholarship".

What do others feel about Ethan's proposition?  The ELS Blog editors continuously re-think the core premises underneath this blog and how it can (I hope) continue to add value for readers.  Aside from perhaps a single handful of rare (and clearly warranted) departures this blog has steadfastly remained moored in all things germane to empirical legal scholarship, broadly defined.  (And in the interest of full disclosure, this is a position I advocated at this blog's inception and continue to support.)  However, other academic blogs--indeed, many other blogs, including some widely-read law blogs--conspicuously adopt a far wider stance and frequently delve into such areas as pop culture, personal narrative, political commentary, gossip, photography, etc.  To be clear, there is no "right" answer to my general query, only perspectives.

New Blog-Voir Dire

Jeff Yates and Andrew Whitford (both of the University of Georgia) have started a new blog entitled Voir Dire, which should be of substantial interest to our readers as it has a law and social sciences focus.   Jeff and Andrew do great work, so I am anxious to read the blog as it  develops.  I have already bookmarked it.  Jeff described the mission of the blog in his first post:

Voir Dire - “to speak the truth.” VDB covers topics such as social science approaches to law and legal institutions, legal doctrine and legal policy implementation, and profession issues for academics. On occasion we dabble in the areas of pop culture, politics, and social issues, but for the most part we are not interested in becoming a pundit blog. VDB is designed as an online forum for the exchange of information on our core topics and research and teaching generally. Our aim is to advance discourse on these topics and highlight research and academic news that we find interesting.

UPDATE: I forgot to post a link in my initial post.  The blog can be viewed here.

Ranking of Law Journals by "Drawing Power"

On the heels of our recently concluded Nance-Steinberg Article Selection Forum (Paul Caron aggregated all the posts here), I ran across this article by Robert Jarvis and Phyllis Coleman (Nova Southeastern Law), "Ranking Law Reviews by Author Prominence--Ten Years Later."  It just appeared in the Law Library Review.

The authors published a similar study ten years ago, which ranked general interest student-edited law journals based on the prominence of its contributors (i.e., "drawing power") during the 1991 to 1995 time period.  The new study is a replication based on 2001 to 2005 data (7573 discrete authors).   

The methodology includes an unusual--and, no doubt some will argue, arbitrary--scale of author prominence.  For example, if the President of the United States publishes remarks in your law review, it is worth 1,000 points.  Here are other examples: 

• 850, U.S. Senator
• 750, State Governor
• 725, U.S. Circuit Court Judge
• 625, Law professor at USN Top 25
• 525, Partner NLJ 250 firm or GC at Fortune 500 company
• 475, Law professor at USN Top 50
• 275, Law professor at USN Tier 3
• 250, Mayor or equivalent
• 225, Law professor at USN Tier 4
• 125, Community college professor
• 75, JD Student
• 50, Paralegal

Boy, am I glad I did not have to draw those lines!  No surprise that journals at the top are Yale Law Journal (score = 553, which is remarkable since it includes student notes), Harvard Law Review (551), Columbia Law Review (543), etc.

What is surprising--at least to me--is the severe dropoff as one moves down the hierarchy.  For example, Houston Law Review is a ranked #50 with a score of 337; #100 Penn State Law Review = 239;  #150 Gonzaga Law Review = 196;  #171 (dead last) Western State Univ. Law Review = 141.  I hope deans of all the new law schools consider this data before agreeing to subside yet another law journal.