Empirical Legal Studies

CELS 2013 Update: Paper Submission Deadline Extended (12 July 2013)

In an effort to accommodate July 4th holiday activities/plans, the submission deadline CELS 2013 papers has been moved back to midnight (EST) on Friday, July 12, 2013.  More conference information follows.

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Information on the 8th Annual CELS 2013, co-sponsored by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) and Penn Law School (and organized this year by David Abrams, Ted Ruger, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan), is now available (here). The 2013 CELS will take place at Penn Law School, from October 25-26. In addition, due to the success of last year's workshop and growing demand, one-day, "hands-on" CELS empirical training workshops will also be offered and are set for October 24-25.

Co-Authorship Musings: Too Much or Too Little?

While Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) (and Liebowitz) approaches the issue of trends in co-authorship from the perspective of economists in this post, the cost-benefit issues incident to co-authorship carry over to legal scholars as well. While the norm in legal scholarship tilts away from co-authorship, this norm is evolving in real-time. Indeed, the increase in empirical legal scholarship contributes to this evolution. On the co-authorship question, Gelman is comparatively bullish: "I [Gelman] have a different perspective in that I think even a small collaboration by a coauthor can make an article or book much stronger. Given that this seems to hold in statistics, where we publish dozens of papers a year, I’d think it would be even more the case in economics, where researchers take years to publish a single article."

Post-Doc Opportunity

Profs. Tian Zheng and Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) hope to fill a full-time postdoctoral position beginning Fall 2014 for work on statistical analysis and modeling of social network data.

Applicants should send email to [email protected] providing:

• a one-page description of past research experience
• a one-page description of future research interests and goals
• a resume of educational and research experience, including publications
• three letters of reference

UCLA's Outstanding Stats Resource

Those looking for either introductory or mid-level instructional on-line resources should visit UCLA's idre site. The site's resources are both deep and wide. Particularly helpful is an array of on-line classes and workshops (some with accompanying videos) that span the leading statistical software packages and include numerous, discrete topical areas. Well worth a look and kudos to UCLA for making it publicly available.

When Independent Variables Reverse Signs

Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) has an interesting post about a nettlesome little topic -- How to make sense of an independent variable that "flips" signs (that is, goes from negative to positive or vice-versa) across model specifications. This phenomena, while unusual, typically arises when control variables are added to a model. Gelman's post includes helpful links to examples in the literature and has attracted insightful comments.

Helpful SPSS Resource

Though most of our stats software package-related posts skew towards Stata, we remain mindful that folks' tastes vary across the most popular packages (e.g., Stata, SPSS, R, SAS). With this in mind, we recently stumbled across a helpful and quite user-friendly SPSS resource. Mounted by SPSS' new owner (IBM), the "Case Studies" tab provides hands-on examples of how to perform various types of statistical analyses and interpret the results. The site walks users through (using quite helpful "screen-shot" slides) a suite of statistical tests found in SPSS' various stats packages. (For one example, factor analysis is explained here.) Worth a look for those using SPSS.