Advanced Legal Research: Analytics

1 unit

This course helps law students acquire technology competence and data literacy in the context of social science, quantitative, and empirical research. Ever since the advent of the Brandeis brief, social science, quantitative, and empirical research have been marshalled for effective judicial advocacy. This course surveys and contextualizes past uses of such research and equips students with the ability to locate the same for improved advocacy. Students will become familiar with a wide range of tools, datasets, and techniques, and will be able to use them to marshal evidence for a particular litigation scenario. Additionally, students will learn an analytical framework to identify the insight-needs required for a particular advocacy application. Tools and concepts include: Bloomberg Analytics; Westlaw Analytics; Lex Machina (Lexis); Context (Lexis); network visualization tools; Microsoft Excel; statistical and regression analysis; gerrymandering analytics; census data; geographic information systems; expert witness analytics; empirical analysis of courts; genetic genealogy; and corpus linguistics.