Empirical Legal Studies

Research Fellow Position -- Center for the Study of the Legal Profession

Based on this announcement, the study of the legal profession as a substantive area of research appears to be gaining traction:

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center (CSLP) invites applications for the position of Research Fellow for the 2009-2010 academic year.  The  Fellow will be based at Georgetown Law Center and will collaborate with CSLP leadership on new and ongoing empirical projects of the Center, as well as pursue her/his own independent research relating to the legal profession.  Research Fellows are invited to participate in CSLP and Law Center activities, including those directed to students and to the research community.

CSLP promotes interdisciplinary scholarship on the profession informed by the challenges of contemporary legal practice; participates in the debate about regulation of the legal profession, both in the US and internationally; and investigates the role of globalization as it relates to the profession generally, law firms and other practice organizations and legal education.  Our current projects include a wide-scale survey of Georgetown law graduates, including international graduates; a symposium on the future of the global law firm (fall 2009); an interview research project exploring how formal policies and informal norms shape law firm culture; and a conference on US approaches to regulation of the legal profession in the wake of changes in foreign regulatory structures governing lawyers.  CSLP also aims to provide students with a sophisticated understanding of the opportunities and challenges of a modern legal career and to furnish members of the profession, particularly those in organizational decision-making positions, with rigorous research that provides broad perspectives on trends and developments in practice.  For more information on CSLP and its activities, please review our website.  

 Applicants must have earned a JD or its equivalent and/or have earned or be working on a PhD in a relevant discipline (including sociology, economics, political science, business, anthropology).  In addition, applicants must have expertise in qualitative or quantitative empirical research.  To apply for the position, please submit a CV and a statement (3 pages maximum) describing your educational background, empirical research skills and experience, and research interests, and explaining how your background and interests relate to the activities of CSLP.  Please also address how the position fits into your overall career goals.

 We will begin reviewing applications in March and will continue until the position is filled.  The Research Fellow will be appointed to a twelve-month term beginning in the summer of 2009.

 The Research Fellow will earn a stipend of $62,500 plus benefits.

 Please submit your application by email to Carole Silver.  No phone inquiries, please.

JELS and Westlaw

Over at Concurring Opinions Dave Hoffman asks why Westlaw (or Lexis) does not yet include the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) in its list of legal titles. Good question. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a JELS co-editor.)

Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop

Northwestern & Wash. U.'s Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop

 Information on the workshop, organized by Lee Epstein (Northwestern) and Andrew Martin (Wash U) and scheduled for May 20-22 in Chicago, is found here (http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/conferences/empiricalworkshop.html).  A summary follows.

"The Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop is for law school faculty interested in learning about empirical research. Leading empirical scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin will teach the workshop, which provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data. Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop."

"Gendered" Authorship?

Over at The Faculty Lounge blog Al Brophy (UNC) discusses emerging empirical work analyzing authorship trends in legal scholarship (focusing on gender). In addition to noting that the broader implications spread beyond legal scholarship, Al's post includes links to some of the recent underlying studies.

Moneyball: Basketball and Statistics

If you like sports and stats, check out this NY Times article:

The No-Stats All-Star

Cyber Cesspool or Marketplace of Ideas: Research Opportunity

Brian Leiter posts the following:

A partner at a Chicago law firm has recently called to my attention that the on-line ABA Journal is increasingly playing host to "comments sections" on articles that are full of sexist and racist abuse, as well as just general unprofessional nastiness and creepiness.  The editors have been shockingly stubborn about cleaning up this mess.  The partner who called this to my attention reports that she and a number of colleagues are interested in supporting some empirical research into whether the abusive comments on the ABA Journal site are falling into certain (unsurprising) patterns, namely, disproportionately targetting women and minorities who are mentioned in stories.  It would also be useful to measure the frequency of abusive comments and their character.  If you have the pertinent expertise, and would be interested in looking into this, please e-mail me and I will put you in touch with the Chicago attorney interested in the project.  She reports that she and her colleagues will be able to provide financial support for research assistance needed for this project.

The Dataverse

I just finished posting some data and documentation on the Dataverse Network.  This is a wonderful -- and remarkably easy to use -- resource that provides scholars with a virtual archive for their data.  It allows you to make your data publicly available in a permanent format with a stable URL -- useful if, for example, you change institutions.  You can even incorporate links to your data into your own website, branding the material as your own, without having to worry about hosting and maintaining it.   If other scholars use or rely on your data, there is a formal citation that they can use, giving you appropriate scholarly credit.

And of course the Dataverse is a great resource for scholars who might want to replicate other people's work or rely on their data.   Thanks to Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science for creating and making available this resource.  You can read more about it here, in a post by Gary King at the Social Science Statistics Blog.

Lott v. Levitt - The End

The Seventh Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of John Lott's defamation claim, the one tied to the meaning of the word "replication."

The court reasoned as follows:

Lott contends that Levitt's refutation of his more-guns/less-crime hypothesis can be read only as a smear of his professional reputation and is therefore defamatory per se. Using an academic definition of “replicate,” Lott maintains that the passage means that others repeated, to a tee, his technical analysis but were unable to duplicate his results, suggesting that he either faked his data or performed his analysis incompetently.

But this technical reading is not the only reasonable interpretation of the passage. After all, Freakonomics didn't become a bestseller by targeting just academics. The book takes into account the lay reader, breaking down technical terms into easily understandable, if imprecise, ideas. For example, the technicalities of regression analysis are explained by an analogy to a golfer's handicap, since both even the playing field so that variables (or golfers) can be compared on all fours. The book relies on anecdotal evidence and describes with only the broadest strokes the statistical methodologies used. In this context, it is reasonable to read “replicate” in more generic terms. That is, the sentence could mean that scholars tried to reach the same conclusion as Lott, using different models, data, and assumptions, but could not do so. This reading does not imply that Lott falsified his results or was incompetent; instead, it suggests only that scholars have disagreed with Lott's findings about the controversial relationship between guns and crime. By concluding that this more generic definition of “replicate” is reasonable, we are not assuming that the reader is a simpleton. After all, econometrics is far from conventional wisdom. We are, however, taking into account the context of the statement and acknowledging that the natural and obvious meaning of “replicate” can lie outside the realm of academia for this broadly appealing book.

The court is wrong to think the "generic definition" of replication is "outside the realm of academia," but the ultimate outcome -- affirming the district court's dismissal -- is the right one.

The opinion is here.

H/T - Volokh

Even More on Punitive Damages: An Empirical Critique of the Court's Exxon Shipping Decision

It did not take long for the Court's Exxon Shipping decision to stimulate a scholarly response. Professors Joni Hersch (Vanderbilt) and Kip Viscusi (Vanderbilt) provide one critique in their paper, Punitive Damages by Numbers: Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker. In it, the authors argue with "the Court's reliance on the median ratio of punitive to compensatory damages in samples of verdicts to set an upper bound for punitive damages awards. Our critique of the approach draws on the properties of statistical distributions and a new analysis of cases with punitive damages awards. The Court's conclusion that a 1:1 ratio establishes a fair upper bound lacks a sound scientific basis."

More on the 'Bull Market' for ELS

The third installment of Jonathan Simon's (Berkeley) interesting series of posts on the future of ELS is here.