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Empirical Legal Research: a state of knowledge across Europe International Conference at the University of Toulouse (9+10 June 2023)

DOI 10.25527/re.2023.03
Toulouse University will soon host a two day conference on empirical legal studies with a particular focus on environmental law. It will bring together scholars from across Europe, including ELS pioneers such as Arthur Dyevre and Mathias Siems. Of twenty speakers overall, two currently work in German academia: Moritz Reese (presenting on "Lessons learned from an implementation study about the water directive") and Konstantin Chatziathanasiou (presenting on "Empirical constitutional law scholarship across Europe"). Here's from the conference website: Empirical legal research is defined as the systematic collection and...
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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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14th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Eight scholars from Germany present their empirical legal scholarship in the US

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.02
Two weeks ago, on March 2, submissions to the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe 2020 closed. Before Oslo will host the next instantiation of the successful conference series, here is a brief recap of the previous conference in November 2019: Does discipline actually decrease police misconduct? Are fines or liability judgements better tools to prevent medical malpractice? What are the hidden effects of ideology among federal court judges? These were among the questions explored by leading legal experts from across the nation at 14th annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) at Claremont McKenna...
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10 Days Left to Register for CELSE in Oslo Registration for 3rd Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe closes on 15th Feb

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.01
On 11th and 12th June 2020, the Norwegian capital will welcome the Conference for Empirical Legal Studies in Europe. Every two years this conference brings together legal academics and researchers from adjacent fields, to exchange about fact research in law and empirical legal findings. From this year's call for applications: CELSE will consider empirical papers across all areas of law, although priority will be given to papers with a European focus. Empirical analysis is understood to encompass any systematic approach to quantitative or qualitative data analysis, including statistical analysis, machine learning,...
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What do Lawyers Have to Count (on)? On the Role of Lawʼs|Empirics in European Legal Studies

DOI 10.25527/re.2019.01
Abstract | In Continental Europe, traditional legal thinking is rather remote from empirical research and statistics. Nonetheless lawyers have been trying for more than one hundred years to fuse knowledge about society’s “isʼs and oughts”. Their attempts had to continuously adapt to changes in the dominant intellectual paradigms, and are now framed as discursive argumentation about different normatively infused descriptions of the world. As such, empirical discourse is indispensable for the law and will shape legal education in the future. Complex legal realities require statistical legal thinking. The new academic blog Law's|Empirics seeks to document...
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