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Scopus/Scimago: Useless for Studying Legal Research! An Empirical Assessment of Misclassification Rates in a Popular Scientometric Data Source

DOI 10.25527/re.2022.02
Empirical research on citation patterns and scholarly reputation in academic research ("scientometrics") frequently relies on a commercial database called Scopus. Scientometric studies routinely analyse the contents of this database as representing the universe of research articles in various academic fields, including legal research. We reviewed the publically available data on German law journals and found that hardly ten percent of them are classified correctly. Even our most charitable count puts the misclassification rate at around 60 percent. In scientometrically studies regarding legal research, the use of Scopus...
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Court Decisions: 99 % Uncharted Deep Sea? Mapping the Blind Spot of Digital Legal Studies over Half a Century (1971-2019)

DOI 10.25527/re.2022.01
Legal research increasingly turns to systematic analyses of large amounts of legal text. Current research programs such as Big Data Legal Scholarship, Evidence-Based Jurisprudence, Law & Corpus Linguistics, Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics, and Law as Data all rely (one way or another) on digitizing or collecting, collectively analysing and quantifying features of text corpora from various genres. First and foremost among these genres are court decisions, due to both their normative force (either stare decisis, or de facto) and their easy and legally unconstrained useability: Court decisions are in the public domain pretty much...
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Empirical Tax Research in Germany Federal Government Plans to Establish New Institute (IfeS)

DOI 10.25527/re.2021.09
Tax research is among the lively fields of empirical interaction between law and economic sciences. One of the authors' faculty supervisor in the US, Jacob Goldin, quite literally made his career off of well-designed large scale field experiments in tax compliance research such as the one published in the National Tax Journal. German legal scholars also study tax compliance using experimental methods. Yet, there is still a dearth of large-scale datasets available for empirical tax research. This is why the German government has now resolved to establish a new institute for empirical tax research called Institut für empirische Steuerforschung (IfeS). Members...
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Berkeley 12 – 0 Stanford International Pedigrees of Private Law Professors in Germany

DOI 10.25527/re.2021.07
The European Football Championship of 2021 is afoot. Many people flock to watch the games - especially today, as the German team competes against Hungary, just hours after German chancellor Merkel publically decried a discriminatory Hungarian law. On days like these, it is hard to know whether politics or football take center-stage. But there's yet another fascinating game that I happened to observe recently: In a paper that got published a few days ago in the German law journal Archiv für die civilistische Praxis ("Archive of Civil Law Studies"), I studied the world of German professors of private law and undertook "An Empirical Inquiry into their...
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Online Symposium “Empirical Turn”

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.06
Ten years ago, German legal researcher Niels Petersen published an academic manifesto (in German, accompanied by an abstract in English) analysing whether continental jurisprudence might need an "empirical turn". His article provoked various responses, including a sharply worded backlash by Ino Augsberg who criticized the "recent empiricist tone in jurisprudence". Ten years later, we revisit the debate in an Online Symposium by Law's|Empirics. Are we any wiser today? Did the passage of time vindicate one view or the other? Or was the disagreement solely about words, maybe even a misunderstanding? Our symposium lets both authors revisit the issue and update the debate, in addition to other contributors whom we asked about their views. All symposium articles...
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Correspondence Experiments in Law An Empirical Approach to Anti-Discrimination Jurisprudence

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.05
Abstract | German law prohibits certain kinds of discrimination in private contract relationships. How can systemic discrimination be identified though? Recently, studies have employed "correspondence experiments", a type of field experiment related to vignette studies: Researchers assume fictitious identities to enter into contract negotiations, and systematically vary the demographic characteristics of their assumed identity. By measuring the respective reaction of other parties, researchers can therefore isolate the causal effect of specific demographic factors on discriminatory responses. A new study from Germany (just published in the academic journal NZM)...
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