Empirical Legal Studies

Announcement: Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference

Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Mathew McCubbins (USC) are organizing what promises to be an exciting and much-needed workshop/conference focusing on research design aspects that bear on inference. The workshop, set for Friday, Aug. 16-20, 2010, will take place at Northwestern's law school in Downtown Chicago. One innovation is that the week-long (5-day) workshop program is modular in nature and will facilitate 3- and 4-day attendance. The Workshop's website, along with detailed information, is here. Excerpted information follows:

Overview: Research design for causal inference is at the heart of a “credibility revolution” in empirical research in the last 15 years that spans many fields. We will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to simulations and to quasi-experiments, where part of the sample is “treated” in some way, and the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither the assignment of cases to treatment and control groups nor administration of the treatment. We will carefully describe the kinds of causal inferences one can and cannot draw from a research design, various threats to valid inference, and research designs commonly used to mitigate those threats.

Most empirical methods courses begin with the methods. They survey how each method works, and what assumptions each relies on. We will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and discuss how to design research to come closer to that goal. The methods reflect the goal and are often adapted to the needs of a particular study. Some of the methods we will discuss are covered in PhD programs, but rarely in depth, and rarely with a focus on causal inference and on which methods to prefer for messy, real-world datasets with limited sample sizes.

Target audience: Quantitative empirical researchers (faculty and graduate students) in social science, including law, political science, economics, most business-school areas (finance, accounting, marketing, etc), sociology, education, psychology – indeed anywhere that causal inference is important.

Symposium: Past and Future of Empirical Sentencing Research

Colleagues at the University of Albany (NY) want to invite all interested to attend an NSF-funded Symposium on the Past and Future of Empirical Sentencing Research. The Symposium is set for September 23 and 24, 2010 in Albany, NY. The Symposium website along with additional information are found here. Inquiries or questions can be directed to: cjsymp@albany.edu

Call For Papers: CELS 2010 -- Deadline Reminder

Information on CELS 2010, scheduled for 5-6 November 2010 at Yale Law School, is here. Of note is that the submission deadline for paper proposals is Friday July 2, 2010.

CELS 2010

Information on CELS 2010, scheduled for 5-6 November 2010 at Yale Law School, is here. Of note is that the submission deadline for paper proposals is Friday July 2, 2010.

CELS 2010

For those inclined to plan ahead, the 5th annual CELS, hosted by Yale Law School, is set for November 5-6, 2010, in New Haven, CT. Also, well-earned kudos are due to the folks at USC Law for hosting last weekend's spectacularly successful 4th annual CELS.

UPDATE: Dave Hoffman's (Temple) summary of CELS 2009 (via Concurring Opinions) is here.

CELS Webcast

For those of you not attending CELS this weekend, you might want to check out the webcast!  Here's the email I recently received from the good folks at USC Law:

Dear Empirical Legal Scholar,
 
We are happy to announce that roughly half of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies will be webcast.  This will enable those who cannot attend the conference in person to hear and view the papers.  In addition, it will allow those who attend the conference to hear presentations that conflict with panels that they attend in person.
 
The webcast will be accessible, starting this Friday (11/20) at 9:45 AM, at:
 
http://law.usc.edu/cels/webcast.cfm
 
The webcast will include all panels held in Rooms 1, 7, 101, and 107.  This includes the following panels:
 
Attitudes & Decisionmaking
Bankruptcy
CEO Pay
Civil Rights
Corporate Governance I
Corporate Governance II
Corporate Governance III
Criminal Evidence
Financial Crisis
Financial Regulation & Investor Protection
Innovation & Growth
International Corporate Governance
Jurors
Law & Politics I
Law & Politics II
Law & Politics III
Law & Politics IV
Methodology I
Methodology II
Methodology III
Methodology IV
Organizational Form
Prisons
Rule of Law
Securities Litigation
Supreme Courts
Venture Capital
Victims & Witnesses
 
For the program, which includes the times at which each of these panels will take place, see:
 
http://law.usc.edu/cels/schedule.cfm
 
We hope you find the webcast a useful supplement to the live program.
 
Yours,
 
Dan Klerman, CELS Co-President
Mat McCubbins, CELS Co-President
Mira Dalpe
Marie Cleaves

Call For Papers - LSA's Culture, Society, and Intellectual Property CRN

Below is a call for papers from the Culture, Society, and Intellectual Property CRN (Collaborative Research Network No. 14) of the Law and Society Association. The deadline for proposals is November 30, 2009, but earlier proposals are encouraged.

CRN 14, Culture, Society, and Intellectual Property, Call for Papers for Upcoming Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, May 27-30, 2010

CRN 14 seeks to encourage interaction between scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives who focus on the legal, social, and cultural dimensions of intellectual properties--including patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and rights of publicity. One goal of this CRN is to encourage creatively eclectic approaches to the study of intellectual property among law and society scholars who draw on traditional doctrinal and policy analyses, historical analyses, cultural studies analyses, and empirical analyses of intellectual property law in action. Intellectual properties, and the processes of globalization of which they are a part, are an especially promising and important area for collaborative research of the kind that law and society scholars have long pioneered.

We are currently organizing panel proposals for the upcoming Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago in May of 2010.  Please contact one of the CRN co-chairs listed below if you have a paper that you would like to present under the sponsorship of this CRN.  We plan to collect individual proposals and organize them into thematic sessions, which we will submit to the Law and Society Association. 

For further information or to submit a paper proposal, please contact:

William Gallagher, Golden Gate University School of Law, wgallagher@ggu.edu  OR

Shubha Ghosh, University of Wisconsin School of Law, ghosh7@wisc.edu

2010 American Psychology-Law Society Conference: Call for Papers

Jeremy Blumenthal (Syracuse) kindly reminded me that the 2010 AP-LS Annual Conference will be held on March 18-20, 2010, at The Westin Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia.  General conference info is here; more specific submission info is found here. The deadline for submissions is October 5, 2009.

CELS paper submission deadline extended to August 3

I just received an e-mail from the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies organizers.  It says, in part:

The deadline for submission of papers has been extended to Monday, August 3, 2009. Information and instructions on how to submit a paper online are available at: http://law.usc.edu/cels/submissions.cfm

Comprehensive information about the conference -- including information about registration, paper submission, travel, and hotels -- is available at: http://law.usc.edu/cels/

Conference on Empirical Research on the Legal Profession

Thanks to the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession and the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, on March 3, 2009 GULC will be holding another major conference on the empirical research on the legal profession.  As always, the public is welcomed to attend.  Details online here. 

One of the best features of the Georgetown conferences is the intense interaction between the academics and the practitioners -- both groups learn a lot and really enjoy the experience.  Over the years, the Center has generated a loyal following within the DC Bar.  

Congrats to Carole Silver, Mitt Regan, Jeff Bauman, and the editors of the Georgetown Journal on Legal Ethics for putting together a wonderful program.