Insofar as I regard Prof. Underhill Moore as the (under-appreciated) intellectual "father" of the modern empirical legal studies movement (full disclosure: a small framed photograph of Moore adorns my office wall), I remain partial to those who recognize Moore's scholarly contributions. Among those includes Profs. Dan Ho (Stanford) and Donald Rubin (Harvard--Statistics) whose paper, Credible Causal Inference for Empirical Legal Studies, leverages Moore's famous New Haven Church Street Parking study.
Recognizing that "causal inference has always been central to the enterprise of empirical legal studies," Ho and Rubin's paper, which should interest many, reviews "modern developments in the statistics of causal inference, focusing in particular on matching methods and regression discontinuity. What unifies such approaches is the prioritization of research design to create--without reference to any data on outcomes--subsets of comparable units. In what might be considered a vindication (or even 'kindred soul') of Moore, modern approaches emphasize design over methods of analysis."
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