Empirical Legal Studies

JD/PhDs on Law Faculties

In a recent paper, Dawn of the Discipline-Based Law Faculty, Lynn LoPucki (UCLA) documents the sharp increase in entry-level hires possessing PhDs at AALS-member law schools between 2011 and 2015. According to Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), who "deplores" this trend, "LoPucki believes the trend in favor of PhD law professors has reached a point of no return, potentially cementing a future where law school faculty, are long on degrees and publications—but short on time outside university walls." Brian Leiter (Chicago) has also recently weighed in on this trend, and his take is a bit more measured and detached: "Although I'm quoted saying that the rise of JD/PhDs will continue, that's a descriptive not normative statement. I think different schools have different missions. And the relevance of the JD/PhD varies by field."

While the rise in empirical legal scholarship and the concurrent increase in law faculty possessing a JD/PhD combo are distinct, to ignore how these two trends interact is to blink at reality. As such, legal empiricists need to be mindful of these critiques.

UPDATE: Readers pointed me to another recent paper, The Ph.D. Rises in American Law Schools, 1960-2011: What Does It Mean for Legal Education?, by Justin McCray (Berkeley) et al. In it, the authors study faculty hiring at the 34th highest-ranked law schools between 1960-2011. After documenting a rise in PhD hiring, the authors note that "the shift toward Ph.D.s entails a complex set of benefits and costs for law schools, and that there is the potential for building connections between practical experience and academic research, rather than simply choosing between them."

2016 Northwestern-Duke Causal Inference Workshop

Northwestern and Duke Universities will hold their 7th annual week-long workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference, at Northwestern University from August 1-5, 2016. Organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Mat McCubbins (Duke), the workshop features an outstanding faculty and is an excellent and efficient way to become acquainted with contemporary approaches for making causal inferences from various kinds of observational and experimental data. Details and registration information can be found here. A brief overview follows:

"Research design for causal inference is at the heart of a 'credibility revolution' in empirical research.  We will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to natural or quasi experiments and to pure observational studies, where part of the sample is treated in some way, the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither the assignment of cases to treatment and control groups nor administration of the treatment.  We will assess the causal inferences one can draw from a research design, threats to valid inference, and research designs that can mitigate those threats."

Null Hypotheses and Public Discourse

Even the self-important newspaper of "record," the New York Times, could benefit from a basic statistics refresher. As Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) observed, a Feb. 11, 2016, NYT headline read as follows: "Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein's Theory". Of course, as Gelman rightly points out, a more technically accurate headline would have read: "Gravitational Waves Detected, Not Falsifying Einstein's Theory".

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016)

While not squarely "empirical," Associate Justice Antonin Scalia's passing today warrants note. Justice Scalia was a leading jurist who leaves a lasting legacy. We offer our condolences to the Scalia family.

Save The Date: CELS 2016

Conference organizers Mathew McCubbins, Stuart Benjamin, and Guy-Uriel Charles announced that the 11th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, hosted by Duke University and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS), is set for November 18-19, 2016, at Duke Law School in Durham, NC. Due to growing and persistent demand, a one-day, hands-on empirical training workshop will once again be offered and is scheduled for Thursday, November 17, 2016. Additional information is forthcoming.

A Postscript to an Earlier Request

A few months ago a post requested readers' assistance with identifying examples of what Jim Greiner (Harvard) and Andrea Matthews, a recent HLS grad, have labelled "randomized control trials" in the U.S. legal profession. (The full post is here.) Jim now reports that their effort has resulted in a draft paper, now circulating on SSRN, entitled: Randomized Control Trials in the United States Legal Profession. The paper's abstract follows.

"We assemble studies within a set that we label "randomized control trials ('RCTs') in the United States legal profession," projects that essentially consist of field experiments conducted for the purpose of obtaining knowledge in which randomization replaces a decision that would otherwise have been made by a member of the United States legal profession. We use our assembly of approximately fifty studies to begin addressing the question of why the United States legal profession, in contrast to the United States medical profession, has resisted the use of the RCT as a knowledge-generating device."

Correlation v. Causation, Redux

While admittedly a slight departure--despite its timeliness--from traditional ELS Blog protocol, this post hopes to illustrate the "correlation v. causation" tension in a novel manner by drawing from, of all things, a recently-leaked Super Bowl 50 advertisement. The ad begins with an observation: "Data suggests 9 months after a Super Bowl victory, winning cities see a rise in births." The remaining wonderfully clever--and long--ad (here) then sets out to intentionally conflate correlation and causation. Regardless of one's interest level in football or Super Bowls, worth a look.