Scholarship

Go Back

Empirical work conducted by those trained in it is a relatively new phenomenon for law schools, especially outside of the elite schools.  What are the challenges we face in supporting such work?  Is it possible to train existing law professors interested in starting to do such work short of enrolling them in masters or PhD programs?  Can student-edited law reviews adequately evaluate (to the extent they adequately evaluate anything) empirical work?  How does empirical work in legal scholarship differ from empirical work being pursued in other (more traditionally empirically-oriented) academic disciplines (e.g., sociology, psychology, economics, etc.)?  What (if anything) can legal academics bring to the project of empirical scholarship that is not contributed by academics working within these other disciplines?  What counts as good empirical scholarship in the legal academy? Do we and should we apply the same standards in evaluating the quality of empirical work as other disciplines do?  What is the relationship between empirical scholarship in law and more traditional methods of legal scholarship?  How has the empirical turn in legal scholarship impacted our understanding of what counts as high-quality legal scholarship?

Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.