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Empirical legal research to test judicial decisions

DOI 10.25527/re.2023.04
In making legal judgements, Dutch courts regularly use so-called 'societal views'. For example, within criminal law 'socio-ethical acceptability' is used as a measure of whether sexual contact between minors is a crime or not. Within private law 'what is socially acceptable' is used as a criterion in tort law, and at the intersection of liability law and corporate law, societal views play a role in the question of whether a natural person's conduct can be imputed to the legal entity. However, although judges rely on views in society when making certain judgments, they rarely mention how or where they found those societal views, nor whether and how they investigated what exactly those societal views are. This raises the question of whether...
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A bridge over clashing waters? Empirical legal studies bridging structural and poststructural feminist standpoints in research

DOI 10.25527/re.2023.02
During my time as a master’s student in Sociology of Law, I often came across the pretense that combining structural- and post-structural feminist standpoints in research is a nearly impossible equation due to epistemological and ontological differences. A clear distinction is that post-structural feminism challenges heteronormativity and the male/female dichotomy that structural feminism illuminates. For example, structural feminists aim to illuminate men’s violence against women whilst post-structural feminists approach violence in a more gender-neutral way.  Thus, differences in structural- and post-structural feminist...
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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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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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Continuity in the Federal Constitutional Court?

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.04
Abstract | The election of new judges to the German Federal Constitutional Court has seen multiple delays in recent years. While we observe increasing debates among politicians when choosing candidates for the bench the public’s opinion with regard to nominees seems to play a minor role. We used a survey-experiment to assess how the German public evaluates traits of judicial nominees. In this post we apply our findings to characteristics of current nominees who may follow on Andreas Voßkuhle and Johannes Masing. The results suggest that all nominees have traits which make them adequate successors of the leaving judges. Moreover, to enhance the courts public standing decision-makers should highlight the judicial qualities of nominees rather than...
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