Empirical Legal Studies

How to Write an Empirical Research Paper

2012-05-24T09:33:43-05:00

For any students (or faculty, for that matter) contemplating a summer research project, Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Poli Sci) offers quite helpful, quick advice on how to approach writing up a research paper (here).

CELS 2012 -- Call for Papers

2012-05-22T07:50:21-05:00

Call for Papers CELS 2012

The Seventh Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS 2012), sponsored by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, will be held in Palo Alto at Stanford Law School on Friday, November 9, and Saturday, November 10, 2012. Paper submission deadline: Sunday, July 8, 2012, midnight (PST).

Conference History

The annual Conferences on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) were launched in 2006, in response to the growing level of empirical scholarship in law schools and elsewhere. It has thus far been held at University of Texas (2006), NYU (2007), Cornell (2008), USC (2009), Yale (2010), and Northwestern (2011), and is scheduled for Stanford (2012), Penn (2013), and UC Berkeley (2014), in each case with generous support from the host school.

Baldy Fellowships

2012-05-15T11:03:28-05:00

The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy at SUNY-Buffalo plans to award several post-doc, mid-career, and senior fellowships for the 2012-13 academic year. The Fellowships are geared toward "scholars pursuing important topics in law, legal institutions, and social policy." The Baldy Center invites applications from an array of disciplines, including "law, the humanities, and the social sciences." What I found particularly notable (and attractive) is that "Fellows are expected to participate regularly in Baldy Center events, but otherwise have no obligations beyond vigorously pursuing their research." (emphasis added) Those interested can find more info here.

Defunding Political Science at NSF

2012-05-10T13:23:00-05:00

Late last night, on a nearly party-line 218-208 vote, the U.S. House passed an amendment (by Rep. Flake, R-AZ) to HR 5326 to "prohibit the use of funds to be used to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation." The Monkey Cage has some of the relevant links. Efforts like this have been mounted before -- most recently in 2009, by Sen. Tom Coburn -- but none have gotten this far.

The actual debate on the defunding amendment (all five minutes of it!) is here, in the CR. I am not enough of a student of the appropriations process (or of legislative politics in general) to speculate on what might happen next. But I do think that if I were Subra Suresh, Myron Gutmann, or the SBE Advisory Committee -- or, for that matter, the directors of the NIJ, any of the NIH agencies, etc. -- I would be very concerned about the precedent that this would set. For Congress to begin micromanaging the NSF at the program level raises some serious concerns about the politicization of science.

Call for Papers: AI and the Law

2012-05-08T13:17:08-05:00

Robert Richards, proprietor of the Legal Informantics Blog, points out a call for papers for a special issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law focused on "modeling policy making." Of particular note for ELS folks is that the special issue welcomes submissions on "the first three phases of the policy cycle: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking."

Stata Users' Favorite Commands

2012-05-03T16:05:26-05:00

The folks over at The Stata Blog recently polled readers (obviously, a non-random selection of Stata users) on their favorite Stata command. While some may find the results (here) themselves interesting, others might find unfamiliar commands that could prove useful.

A History of "p" Levels

2012-04-25T16:40:08-05:00

While most ELS Blog readers understand traditional significance ("p") levels, few understand how (or why) "0.05" emerged as the standard for statistical significance. In The Adoption of Significance Tests by the Scientific Community: An Empirical Analysis, David A. Gully (Columbia--Engineering) discusses the adoption of the 0.05 standard. A excerpted abstract follows:

"This paper adds to the literature by determining the timing and level of acceptance of common tests of statistical inference. Using the archives of the Royal Society, we examined 574 research studies published between 1926 and 1997, by which point adoption was virtually complete... We detect the presence of several influences on the rate of adoption, which may include prior custom, the nature of empirical research topics being reported, the increasing ease of computer processing, and possibly journal editorial policies. We find that confidence/significance testing has been adopted by a majority of the scientific community for over 50 years; the customary reliance on 95 percent confidence (five percent significance) is upheld by the data; and that confidence intervals and critical significance levels are both widely reported and often together in recent decades."