Empirical Legal Studies

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.

Emerging Data on Stata's YouTube Channel

While noting that Stata does not shy away from holding its own initiatives up to data should not surprise, a summary report on the initial six months of Stata's YouTube Channel usage might interest readers. If there is any surprise in a summary (and descriptive) blog post (here), perhaps it's the degree to which this project is succeeding. What Stata is doing is certainly generating interest (thus far, anyway) and I assume we'll see similar efforts by others in the near future.

The Dataverse

I just finished posting some data and documentation on the Dataverse Network.  This is a wonderful -- and remarkably easy to use -- resource that provides scholars with a virtual archive for their data.  It allows you to make your data publicly available in a permanent format with a stable URL -- useful if, for example, you change institutions.  You can even incorporate links to your data into your own website, branding the material as your own, without having to worry about hosting and maintaining it.   If other scholars use or rely on your data, there is a formal citation that they can use, giving you appropriate scholarly credit.

And of course the Dataverse is a great resource for scholars who might want to replicate other people's work or rely on their data.   Thanks to Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science for creating and making available this resource.  You can read more about it here, in a post by Gary King at the Social Science Statistics Blog.