Social-Scientific Research for Lawyers Seminar

3 units

Lawyers constantly evaluate and make legal arguments based on facts about the world. Often, these facts are not universally accepted. These facts usually stem from empirical research, and the debate over the facts is usually about the debate over the empirical research. Empirical research can be difficult to understand, but a lot of today's empirical research uses only a handful of methods. In this seminar, you will learn about these methods and the main legal questions that they have been applied to address. The goal of this seminar is not to become a producer of empirical research, and students will not attempt to conduct any empirical analysis. There will be no coding in the seminar. Rather, the goal of the seminar is to become a better consumer of empirical research. Class time will be devoted to understanding the intuition of empirical methods and how they should be applied. There will be no math in class, and students are encouraged to skip over all the math in the readings. With better intuition about the common empirical methods and how they should be applied, students will be able to ask the right questions if presented with arguments based on empirical research. Students will be required to write two papers responding to the reading assignments (4 pages each), a review of one empirical paper (4 pages), and an amicus brief analyzing empirical aspects of a recent or pending case (8 pages). Students will receive feedback on their earlier papers to assist them in structuring subsequent papers.