Empirical Legal Studies

More ELS (Summer) Workshops

Back for its 13th year is the Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop, co-sponsored by Wash U and USC and co-directed by Andrew Martin and Lee Epstein. The Workshop will run from June 9-11, 2014, and take place at Wash U (St. Louis). A brief description follows. (For more detailed information click here.)

"The 13th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop will take place at Washington University in St. Louis. The workshop is for law school faculty, political science faculty, and graduate students interested in learning about empirical research and how to evaluate empirical work. 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."

2014 AALS Annual Meeting: Quant. & Qual. Workshops

Due to last year's success and sustained demand, the AALS is offering two separate workshops at its annual meeting, both scheduled for Jan. 4-5, 2014. One workshop will focus on quantitative methods, taught by Ted Eisenberg (Cornell) and Marty Wells (Cornell), and another on qualitative and mixed methods, taught by an array of scholars.  For registration information (click here); additional information from the AALS website follows.

"The [AALS] Committee on Research presents two intensive 10-hour courses on statistical analysis in the legal context. Choose between quantitative and qualitative. The workshops will take place Saturday, January 4, from 2:00-5:00 p.m. and continue on Sunday, January 5, from 9:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m. There is an additional registration fee of $100 for each workshop which includes a box lunch on Sunday. Advance registration is required and homework will be assigned."

Measuring Citations Across Disciplines

Via Maya Sen and Twitter, I spent some time playing around with Scholarometer, a web interface to a database that allows for normalized comparisons of citation metrics (like the h-index) across different disciplines. If you're looking to kill a few minutes this weekend, you might want to go do the same.

One thing that I had suspected was that -- because of the predominance of single-authorship among lawprofs -- the normalized h-index for those tagged in "law" would be lower than in political science, and the distribution of h would be a steeper power-law-like shape than in political science or in other disciplines. And, in fact, that's exactly what we see: In law, a normalized h index score of 3 is good for about 12th place among all rated scholars, and a score of 2 is still in the top 25. In political science, by contrast, a normalized h score of 3 is only good enough for about 40th place over all, and a score of 2 doesn't even get you into the top 100.

Empiricism, Experiments, and International Law

Beginning from the premise that "[s]cholarship on international law has undergone an empirical revolution," Adam S. Chilton (Chicago) and Dustin H. Tingley (Harvard--Govt.), in Why the Study of International Law Needs Experiments, go on to argue for more experiments in international law scholarship. Regardless of whether the authors' claims persuade, most agree that international law poses particular research design challenges and includes unusual barriers to reliable causal inference. The paper's full abstract follows.

"Scholarship on international law has undergone an empirical revolution. Throughout the revolution, however, shortcomings of the observational data that studies have used have posed serious barriers to reliable causal inference. During the same period, political scientists and legal scholars studying domestic law have increasingly employed experimental methods because they make it easier to make credible causal claims. Despite the simultaneous emergence of those trends, there have been relatively few attempts to use experimental methods to study international law. This should change. In this paper we present the first argument that the study of international law could uniquely benefit from the use of experimental research methods. To make this argument, we present data we have collected that illustrates why observational studies will often be unable to provide answers to many of the most important questions to legal scholars. After doing so, we provide guidance on how laboratory, survey, and field experiments can be used by legal scholars to research international law."