Empirical Legal Studies

Scholarly Dishonor

While this incident did not involve any ELS scholars, the take-aways and lessons for those who work with data remain germane. This cautionary tale involves Marc Hauser, a noted former Harvard psychology researcher who resigned under an ethical cloud in 2011. Snippets from the Office of Research Integrity's report on Hauser are here (commentary here). One key passage follows:

“. . . Hauser’s shortcomings in respect to research integrity have in the main consisted instead of repeated instances of cutting corners, of pushing analyses of data further in the direction of significance than the actual findings warranted, and of reporting results as he may have wished them to have been, rather than as they actually were.”

Administrative Conference, Administrative Law, & ELS

In a brief essay, The Administrative Conference and Empirical Research, Richard Pierce (George Washington) describes the various ways the Administrative Conference has contributed to empirical work in administrative law. "One of the many important contributions of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) to the development and understanding of administrative law lies in its critical role in encouraging legal scholars to engage in empirical research."

Pierce points to empirical work evidencing how notice and comment rulemaking systematically favors regulated industries as particularly important. He goes on to identify sources of the bias. "Once we have a clear picture of the nature and magnitude of the systemic bias in favor of regulated firms in the notice and comment rulemaking process it is relatively easy to identify the major sources of the bias. They include: collective action problems, judicial decisions that define an adequate NPR, judicial decisions that define an adequate statement of basis and purpose, and judicial decisions that determine who has standing to obtain judicial review of rules."

An Updated Database of State Tort Law Reforms (5th)

Ronen Avraham (Texas) recently alerted me to an update of one of the more helpful resources around for those who study torts and tort reform. Specifically, the Database of State Tort Law Reforms (DSTLR 5th) seeks to create "one 'canonized' dataset will increase our understanding of tort reform’s impacts on our lives." A fuller (though excerpted) description follows.

"This manuscript of the DSTLR (5th) updates the DSTLR (4th) and contains the most detailed, complete and comprehensive legal dataset of the most prevalent tort reforms in the United States between 1980 and 2012.... The dataset records state laws in all fifty states and the District of Columbia over the last several decades. For each reform we record the effective date, a short description of the reform, whether or not the jury is allowed to know about the reform, whether the reform was upheld or struck down by the states’ courts, as well as whether it was amended by the state legislator... ."

Northwestern University Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference

Once again, Northwestern University will be sponsoring a pair of workshops on "Research Design for Causal Inference," organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Mat McCubbins (Duke).  Details can be found here; there is no formal registration deadline, but space is limited (and registration for the "main workshop" July 7-11 is already closed to graduate students). These workshops feature world-class faculty, and are an excellent, efficient way to become acquainted with contemporary approaches for making causal inferences from various kinds of observational and experimental data.

Perspectives on P-values

A recent issue of Ecology (95:3, Mar. 2014) includes a mini-symposium on p-values. (For a comment from Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) that did not make it into the issue (although invited), click here.) Gelman's point about null hypotheses bears highlighting:

"In common practice, however, the “null hypothesis” is a straw man that exists only to be rejected. In this case, I am typically much more interested in the size of the effect, its persistence, and how it varies across different situations. I would like to reserve hypothesis testing for the exploration of serious hypotheses and not as in indirect form of statistical inference that typically has the effect of reducing scientific explorations to yes/no conclusions."

lawstat: An R package for Biostatistics, Public Policy, and Law

lawstat is an "R software package on statistical tests widely utilized in biostatistics, public policy and law." It gathers together a range of basic, commonly-used statistical procedures, and includes examples from those fields. Particularly for those of you new to R, it's worth adding to your list of useful R resources.

More ELS Scholars in the News

The migration (exodus?) of ELSers into administrative roles continues. In case you haven't heard by now, this fall Professor Andrew Martin, currently of Washington University, will assume the position of Dean of the College of Literature, Sciences, and Arts at the University of Michigan. Andrew is an accomplished scholar and administrator, and a good friend of (and occasional guest-blogger at) the ELS Blog. Congratulations, Andrew!

CELS 2014 Paper Submission Deadline Reminder

The 9th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS 2014), sponsored by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS), will be hosted by UC Berkeley School of Law and take place on Nov. 7-8, 2014. Please note that the paper submission deadline is Mon., July 7, 2014, at 11:59 PM (PST).

To submit a paper for consideration, please click on SSRN's CELS 2014 submission page (here). (Do not use the "regular" SSRN paper submission system.)

2013's Ten "Best Corporate and Securities Articles" & JELS

Robert Thompson (Georgetown) announced the 2013 ten "Best Corporate and Securities Articles" (click here for the list). In addition to congratulating this year's winning articles, I also note that 2/10 of the winning articles, Armour et al., Is Delaware Losing Its Cases? and Coates, Corporate Politics, Governance, and Value Before and After Citizens United, were published in JELS.

ELS Scholars in the News

I am delighted by the news that noted ELS scholar (and, by way of full disclosure, co-author, friend, and colleague) Andy Morriss was just named Dean at the Texas A&M School of Law. As Brian Leiter (Chicago) notes, this is a huge "hiring coup" for A&M.

The ICPSR Summer Program

Once again, the the ICPSR will be offering its Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research during June, July and August. Most readers are probably familiar with the program, and in any event there is more to say about it (all good) than I have time for right now. But ICYMI, several years ago Geoffrey Rapp posted this ICPSR Survival Guide for the Law Professor on Prawfsblawg, and it remains a good guide to some dos and don'ts for the program (and not just for law professors).

ICPSR Summer Workshops

While best known as the leading archive of social science data, one of the ICPSR's lesser-appreciated assets includes its summer programs/workshops. For more than 50 years, the ICPSR has conducted a range (90+) of courses/seminars/workshops, principally based at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus, that spans the arc of quantitative methods as well as a diverse array of social scientific fields. Workshop formats vary as well, ranging from 3-5 day courses to 4-week offerings. These offerings can be invaluable for graduate (and undergraduate) students as well as faculty.

Multiplicative Interactions in Generalized Linear Models

The ELS blog has had a thing about interaction terms in regression-y models for a while now (see e.g. here and here and here). For readers outside the quantitative-political-science ecosystem, there has also been an ongoing set of... shall we say... discussions in the field about specifying and interpreting interaction terms in generalized linear models for twenty years or so. A recent paper by Tsung-han Tsai and Jeff Gill is the latest weigh-in on the matter, and also manages to be an excellent, clear exposition of the use and interpretation of such interactions. Since the journal in which it appears is relatively new, I thought I'd bring it to people's attention.