S. Empirical Studies Lab

The role of empirical methods in legal research, caselaw and practice has expanded over the past two decades. Contemporary issues in constitutional law, public policy and regulation, and the adjudication of a wide range of civil and criminal questions, have relied extensively on scientific evidence. Empirical methods also are widely used in formulating litigation strategy, or in developing standards to guide evidence and fact-finding. Accordingly, modern practice requires facility in the underlying foundations of empirical methods and scientific evidence. Judges' gatekeeping roles have expanded to include vetting of scientific evidence, especially the methods that produced it. Despite its now common use in several domains of legal analysis and its pivotal role in caselaw, scientific evidence and empirical research are still developing as a focus of study in legal education. Also, legal education now takes place alongside and at often in combination with training in scientific disciplines leading to integrated cross-disciplinary analytic methods that now populate both leading journals and court opinions. The Empirical Legal Studies Lab (ELSL) hopes to integrate and develop new research and scholarship efforts within a single intellectual space in the law school and related disciplines for student-led contributions.

This course will be a laboratory for intensive empirical legal research on topics of interest and importance to law. The ELSL will be a student-focused model of faculty-student research partnership, putting experiential learning in empirical research at the center of the endeavor. ELSL will provide opportunities for students to work under close faculty supervision to to conduct data-intensive law- or practice-related investigations, develop specialized technical skills, and engage deeply with faculty or legal practitioners. ELSL aims to develop research projects derived directly from the shared interests of students, faculty, the larger community of legal scholarship, and for some, providers of legal and law-related services. Topics will be chosen by the student, the instructor and participating faculty in consultation. Faculty from specific subject areas in law will be available to work with students and co-supervise them together with the instructor.

In the ELSL, which will be modeled along the contours of a clinic, students will design and conduct empirical analysis using contemporary analytic tools in empirical studies. Supervision will follow a clinical supervision model with faculty working either directly and collaboratively with students, or in close contact in supervising students. Supervision will include problem solving, progress review, and project planning. Students will be selected for the course who have basic training in any of several scientific disciplines, and will receive additional specialized training throughout the semester. Students will produce publication-ready papers to appear in law reviews or peer-reviewed journals, possibly co-authored with faculty, that can fulfill major writing requirements. Students also may work in teams for major projects. Research in agency settings via externships will be possible, providing student-practitioner interactions to frame legal and research questions. Student papers will be presented in a workshop or conference format over the course of a day at the close of the Fall semester, in a forum open to the Law School community.