empirical legal research topics

Harvard Empirical Legal Studies Series

5005 Wasserstein Hall (WCC) 1585 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA02138

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The  Harvard Empirical Legal Studies (HELS) Series  explores a range of empirical methods, both qualitative and quantitative, and their application in legal scholarship in different areas of the law. It is a platform for engaging with current empirical research, hearing from leading scholars working in a variety of fields, and developing ideas and empirical projects.

HELS is open to all students and scholars with an interest in empirical research. No prior background in empirical legal research is necessary. If you would like to join HELS and receive information about our sessions, please subscribe to our mailing list by completing the HELS mailing list form .

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the current HELS coordinator,  Tiran Bajgiran.

All times are provided in U.S. Eastern Time (UTC/GMT-0400).

Spring 2024 Sessions

Empire and the shaping of american constitutional law.

Aziz Rana, BC Law

Monday, Mar. 25, 12:15 PM Lewis 202

This talk will explore how US imperial practice has influenced the methods and boundaries of American constitutional study.

Historical Approaches to Neoliberal Legality

Quinn Slobodian, Boston University

Thursday, Mar. 28, 12:15 PM Lewis 202

Fall 2023 Sessions

On critical quantitative methods.

Hendrik Theine , WU, Vienna/Univ. of Pennsylvania Monday, Nov. 6, 12:30 PM Lewis 202

Economic inequality is a profound challenge in the United States. Both income and wealth inequality increased remarkably since the 1980s. This growing concentration of economic inequality creates real-world political and societal problems which are increasingly reflected by social science scholarship. Among those detriments is for instance the increasing economic and political power of the super-rich. The research at hand takes a new radical look at media discourses of economic inequality over four decades in various elite US newspapers by way of quantitative critical discourse analysis. It shows that up until recently, there was minimal media coverage of economic inequality, but interest has steadily increased since then. Initially, the focus was primarily on income inequality, but over time, it has expanded to encompass broader issues of inequality. Notably, the discourse on economic inequality is significantly influenced by party politics and elections. The study also highlights certain limitations in the discourse. Critiques of inequality tend to remain at a general level, discussing concepts like capitalist and racial inequality. There is relatively less focus on policy-related discussions, such as tax reform, or discussions centered around specific actors, like the wealthy and their charitable contributions.

Spring 2023 Sessions

How to conduct qualitative empirical legal scholarship.

Jessica Silbey , Professor of Law at Boston University Yanakakis Faculty Research Scholar

Friday, March 31, 12:30 PM WCC 3034

This session explores the benefits and some limitations of qualitative research methods to study intellectual property law. It compares quantitative research methods and the economic analysis of law in the same field as other kinds of empirical inquiry that are helpful in collaboration but limited in isolation. Creativity and innovation, the practices intellectual property law purports to regulate, are not amenable to quantification without identifying qualitative variables. The lessons from this session apply across fields of legal research.

Fall 2022 Sessions

How to read quantitative empirical legal scholarship.

Holger Spamann , Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law

Friday, September 13, 12:30 PM WCC 3007

As legal scholars, what tools do we need to read critically and engage productively with quantitative empirical scholarship? In the first session of the 2022-2023 Harvard Empirical Legal Studies Series, Harvard Law School Professor Holger Spamann will compare and discuss different quantitative studies. This session will be a first approximation to be able to understand and eventually produce empirical legal scholarship. All students and scholars interested in empirical research are welcome and encouraged to attend.

How do People Learn from Not Being Caught? An Experimental Investigation of a “Non-Occurrence Bias”

Tom Zur , John M. Olin Fellow and SJD candidate, HLS

Friday, November 4, 2:00 PM WCC 3007

The law and economics literature on specific deterrence has long theorized that offenders rationally learn from being caught and sanctioned. This paper presents evidence from a randomized controlled trial showing that offenders learn differently when not being caught as compared to being caught, which we call a “non-occurrence bias.” This implies that the socially optimal level of investment in law enforcement should be lower than stipulated by rational choice theory, even on grounds of deterrence alone.

Empirical Legal Research: Using Data and Methodology to Craft a Research Agenda

Florencia Marotta-Wurgler , NYU Boxer Family Professor of Law Faculty Director, NYU Law in Buenos Aires

Monday, November 14, 12:30 PM Lewis 202

Using a series of examples, this discussion will focus on strategies to conduct empirical legal research and develop a robust research agenda. Topics will include creating a data set and leveraging to answer unexplored questions, developing meaningful methodologies to address legal questions, building on existing work to develop a robust research agenda, and engaging the process of automation and scaling up to develop large scale data sets using machine learning approaches. 

Resources for Empirical Research

• HLS Library Empirical Research Service
• Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Research (IQSS)
• Harvard Committee on the Use of Human Subjects
• Qualtrics Harvard
• Harvard Kennedy School Behavioral Insights Group

Past HELS Sessions

Holger Spamann (Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law) – How to Read Quantitative Empirical Legal Scholarship?

Katerina Linos (Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law) – Qualitative Methods for Law Review Writing

Aziza Ahmed (Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law) – Risk and Rage: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS

Amy Kapczynski and Yochai Benkler –(Professor of Law at Yale; Professor of Law at Harvard) Law & Political Economy and the Question of Method

Jessica Silbey – (Boston University School of Law) Ethnography in Legal Scholarship

Roberto Tallarita – (Lecturer on Law, and Associate Director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard) The Limits of Portfolio Primacy

Susan S. Silbey – (Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology at MIT) HELS with Susan Silbey: Analyzing Ethnographic Data and Producting New Theory

Cass R. Sunstein  (University Professor at Harvard) – Optimal Sludge? The Price of Program Integrity

Scott L. Cummings  (Professor of Legal Ethics and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law) – The Making of Public Interest Lawyers

Elliot Ash  (Assistant Professor of Law, Economics, and Data Science at ETH Zürich) – Gender Attitudes in the Judiciary: Evidence from U.S. Circuit Courts

Kathleen Thelen  (Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT) – Employer Organization in the United States: Historical Legacies and the Long Shadow of the American Courts

Omer Kimhi  (Associate Professor at Haifa University Law School) – Caught In a Circle of Debt – Consumer Bankruptcy Discharge and Its Aftereffects

Suresh Naidu  (Professor in Economics and International and Public Affairs, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs) – Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice

Vardit Ravitsky  (Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal) – Empirical Bioethics: The Example of Research on Prenatal Testing

Johnnie Lotesta  (Postdoctoral Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School) – Opinion Crafting and the Making of U.S. Labor Law in the States

David Hagmann  (Harvard Kennedy School) – The Agent-Selection Dilemma in Distributive Bargaining

Cass R. Sunstein  (Harvard Law School) – Rear Visibility and Some Problems for Economic Analysis (with Particular Reference to Experience Goods)

Talia Gillis  (Ph.D. Candidate and S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Business School and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Law School) – False Dreams of Algorithmic Fairness: The Case of Credit Pricing

Tzachi Raz (Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Harvard University) – There’s No Such Thing as Free Land: The Homestead Act and Economic Development

Crystal Yang (Harvard Law School) – Fear and the Safety Net: Evidence from Secure Communities

Adaner Usmani (Harvard Sociology) – The Origins of Mass Incarceration

Jim Greiner (Harvard Law School) – Randomized Control Trials in the Legal Profession

Talia Shiff  (Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Department of Sociology, Harvard University) – Legal Standards and Moral Worth in Frontline Decision-Making: Evaluations of Victimization in US Asylum Determinations

Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School) – Rebel Talent

Joscha Legewie (Department of Sociology, Harvard University) – The Effects of Policing on Educational Outcomes and Health of Minority Youth

Ryan D. Enos (Department of Government, Harvard University) – The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics

Katerina Linos (Berkeley Law, University of California) – How Technology Transforms Refugee Law

Roie Hauser (Visiting Researcher at the Program on Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School) – Term Length and the Role of Independent Directors in Acquisitions

Anina Schwarzenbach (Fellow, National Security Program, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School) – A Challenge to Legitimacy: Effects of Stop-and-Search Police Contacts on Young People’s Relations with the Police

Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) – Willingness to Pay to Use Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, and More: A National Survey

Netta Barak-Corren (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – The War Within

James Greiner & Holger Spamann (Harvard Law School) – Panel: Why​ ​Does​ ​the​ ​Legal​ ​Profession​ ​Resist​ ​Rigorous​ ​Empiricism?

Mila Versteeg (University of Virginia School of Law) (with Adam Chilton) – Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference?

Susan S. Silbey (MIT Department of Anthropology) (with Patricia Ewick) – The Common Place of Law

Holger Spamann (Harvard Law School) – Empirical Legal Studies: What They Are and How NOT to Do Them

Arevik Avedian (Harvard Law School) – How to Read an Empirical Paper in Law

James Greiner (Harvard Law School) – Randomized Experiments in the Law

Robert MacCoun (Stanford Law School) – Coping with Rapidly Changing Standards and Practices in the Empirical Sciences (including ELS)

Mario Small (Harvard Department of Sociology) – Qualitative Research in the Big Data Era

Adam Chilton (University of Chicago Law School) – Trade Openness and Antitrust Law

Jennifer Lerner (Harvard Kennedy School and Department of Psychology) – Anger in Legal Decision Making

Sarah Dryden-Peterson (Harvard Graduate School of Education) – Respect, Reciprocity, and Relationships in Interview-Based Research

Charles Wang (Harvard Business School) – Natural Experiments and Court Rulings

Guhan Subramanian (Harvard Law School) – Determining Fair Value

James Greiner (Harvard Law School) – Randomized Control Trials and the Impact of Legal Aid

Maya Sen (Harvard Kennedy School) – The Political Ideologies of Law Clerks and their Judges

Daria Roithmayr (University of Southern California Law School) – The Dynamics of Police Violence

Crystal Yang (Harvard Law School) – Empiricism in the Service of Criminal Law and Theory

Oren Bar-Gill (Harvard Law School) – Is Empirical Legal Studies Changing Law and Economics?

Elizabeth Linos (Harvard Kennedy School; VP, Head of Research and Evaluation, North America, Behavioral Insights Team) – Behavioral Law and Economics in Action: BIT, BIG, and the policymaking of choice architecture

Meira Levinson (Harvard School of Education) – Justice in Schools: Qualitative Sociological Research and Normative Ethics in Schools

Howell Jackson (HLS) – Cost-Benefit Analysis

Michael Heise (Cornell Law School) – Quantitative Research in Law: An Introductory Workshop

Susan Silbey (MIT) – Interviews: An Introductory Workshop

Kevin Quinn (UC Berkeley) – Quantifying Judicial Decisions

Holger Spamman (Harvard Law School) – Comparative Empirical Research

James Greiner (Harvard Law School) – Randomized Controlled Trials in the Research of Legal Problems

Michael Heise (Cornell Law School) – Quantitative Research in Law

James Greiner (Harvard Law School) – A Typology of Empirical Methods in Law

David Wilkins (Harvard Law School) – Mixed Methods Work and the Legal Profession

Tom Tyler (Yale Law School) – Fairness and Policing

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Sources of Legal and Judicial Data

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Legal and judicial data are used to study the law with quantitative or empirical methods, and is quite different from traditional legal research.  The tools listed below provide data sets and other helpful tools and information for this type of research.

• The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research by Peter Cane, Herbert M. Kritzer Publication Date: 2010 This volume provides a guide to one of the central developments in modern legal scholarship. 43 chapters trace the development of the field, its methodology, and its contribution to understanding every aspect of the modern legal world - from policing to finance, employment to the environment.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies : The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) is a peer-edited, peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality, emirically-oriented articles of interest to scholars in a diverse range of law and law-related fields, including civil justice, corporate law, criminal justice, domestic relations, economics, finance, health care, political science, psychology, public policy, securities regulation, and sociology.

Supreme Court Database : Known commonly as the Spaeth data set, it provides over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.  It provides two large sets of data, one covering 1791-1945, and one covering 1946-2018.

The Judicial Research Initiative, sponsored by the University of South Carolina : This site allows users to download electronic datasets of court cases, including Federal Courts of Appeals cases, obtain smaller datasets or measures of judicially relevant phenomena, read various working papers on important topics, and link to other websites containing law and judicial politics information .  Also contains data for foreign high courts.

• DSS Judicial/Legal System/Law Listings Data and Statistical Services unit maintains the library's data sources. This link provides access to the data sources with subjects related to legal systems and law.
• FastCase: Caselaw, Statutes and Administrative Law Provides access to the texts of federal and state caselaw, statutes, and regulations, as well as federal administrative opinions. All published federal and state caselaw is included. Federal and state statutes and regulations go back to 2008. Federal administrative opinions include opinions from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Patent Trial and Appeal Board, various immigration agencies, and others. Access requires knowledge of a programming language such as Python or R.
• Carp-Manning U.S. District Court Database Contains decision-making data on 110,000+ decisions by federal district court judges handed down from 1927 to 2012. The dataset includes coded decisions published in the Federal Supplement, the primary publication venue for U.S. district court rulings. This data is a resource for scholars who conduct quantitative research on the federal courts and complements the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals databases.
• Harvard Caselaw Access Project Includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States. Scope includes all state courts and federal courts. Research scholars can qualify for bulk data access by agreeing to certain use and redistribution restrictions. You can request a bulk access agreement by creating an account and then visiting your account page.
• ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) This link opens in a new window World's largest archive of digital social science data. more... less... Must register for an account in order to download data. Restricted to academic research by Princeton University faculty and students.
• TRACFed This link opens in a new window Data warehouse providing access to detailed data on trends and individual activities/transactions of U.S. federal government staffing, spending, judicial performance, and criminal, civil, and administrative enforcement actions.

Searchable database containing biographical information of over 20,000 federal and state Judges. Also contains information on over 2600 federal and state courts, 3,000 detailed court profiles, and over 100 detailed judicial jurisdictional maps. Updated daily.

Judicial Business of the United States Courts: Annual Reports : Provides statistics on the work of the Federal Judiciary for a fiscal year, comparing data between years, and, when possible, explaining increases or decreases in caseloads. Separate sections of the report address the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services system; and other components of the Federal Judiciary. Caseload totals for the major programs of the Federal Judiciary appear in the table of judicial caseload indicators .

Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts : Provides statistical data on the business of the federal Judiciary. Specific publications address the work of the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services systems; and other components of the U.S. courts.

State Court Statistics Project : Publishes caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

International Courts Data, Georgetown University : This web-site provides a portal for students and scholars interested in the empirical study of international courts. Most importantly, the site provides access to datasets collected by various scholars.

Attributes of U.S. Federal Judges Database: Database on the personal, social, economic, career and political attributes of judges who served on the United States Courts of Appeals from 1801 to 2000.

Federal Court Cases Integrated Database Series : Contains data back to 1970 on civil case and criminal defendant filings and terminations in the federal courts.

Martin-Quinn Scores : Measuring the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum allows us to better understand the politics of the high court.

• Bailey Ideal Points Scores, 1951-2011 Estimates ideal points for each Supreme Court justice, president, senator, and representative for each year from 1951 to 2011 allowing for comparison of ideology across institutions using a common measure. Also provides Supreme Court and congressional medians for each year from 1951 to 2011. Data in Excel.
• Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges, 1789-present The directory includes the biographies of judges appointed since 1789 to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. courts of appeals, the U.S. district courts, the former U.S. circuit courts, and the federal judiciary's courts of special jurisdiction. These judges were appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate. In addition, the directory includes the biographies of judges who received presidential recess appointments to the aforementioned courts but were not confirmed by the Senate to permanent positions. Includes many biographical elements, including gender, race, birthplace, ABA rating, degree history, and professional synopsis. Full database can be downloaded as .csv file.
• Women on High Courts Dataset Provides over-time and cross-national data on women on high courts. The dataset includes information on the year the first woman was appointed and the gender composition of the high court. High courts include single peak courts as found in many common law countries and constitutional courts and highest appellate courts as found in many civil law countries." Data on first woman: 1946–2020; data on composition: 1970 or court creation–2013. Countries included have a population of 200,000 or greater. Data compiled from a combination of secondary sources and information from countries' courts and judges. Data in multiple formats.
• Judicial Review of Congress Database Project by Keith Whittington catalogs all the cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court has substantively reviewed the constitutionality of a provision or application of a federal law, both those upholding and invalidating provisions of federal statutes. Currently includes 1308 cases decided by the Court from its founding through its October 2017 term and related pieces of information about those cases. Data in Excel.
• Selected State Substantive and Preemptive Laws 2009-2018, United States (umich.edu) The Selected State Preemptive Laws Dataset (SSPLD) was developed to study trends in preemption laws across states from 2009-2018. Researchers selected four domains where states and localities had enacted substantive and preemptive laws: (1) Paid sick days, (2) food, (3) tobacco, and (4) firearms. For three of these domains (sick days, food, and tobacco), state substantive laws are also included in this dataset for each of the policy topics included in the domain.
• Research Data on International Courts In order to improve the accessibility of research data on international courts, this website provides an overview of and links to official data sources and datasets made available by researchers, including data compiled by researchers at PluriCourts.
• The CEPS EurLex Dataset The dataset contains 142.036 EU laws - almost the entire corpus of the EU's legally binding acts passed between 1952 - 2019. It encompasses the three types of legally binding acts passed by the EU institutions: 102.304 regulations, 4.070 directives, 35.798 decisions in English language. The dataset was scraped from the official EU legal database (Eur-lex.eu) and transformed in machine-readable CSV format with the programming languages R and Python. The dataset was collected by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) for the TRIGGER project (https://trigger-project.eu/).
• Indian Court Cases Provides data on 81.2 million court cases in India’s lower judiciary between 2010 and 2018, drawn from the country’s e-Courts platform. It’s “the largest open-access dataset on judicial proceedings in the world,” says project coauthor Aditi Bhowmick. The public dataset contains each case’s state, district, court, case type, filing and decision dates, defendant and petitioner genders, legal codes, and more. It “has been fully anonymized to prevent the identification of individual judges or litigants,” but researchers can apply for more extensive access.
• Corpus of Decisions: Permanent Court of International Justice (CD-PCIJ) Collects and presents for the first time in human- and machine-readable formats all documents of PCIJ Series A, B and A/B of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ). Among these are judgments, advisory opinions, orders, appended minority opinions, annexes, applications instituting proceedings and requests for an advisory opinion.
• Corpus of Decisions: International Court of Justice (CD-ICJ) Collects and presents for the first time in human- and machine-readable form all published decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Among these are judgments, advisory opinions and orders, as well as their respective appended minority opinions (declarations, separate opinions and dissenting opinions).
• Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789-1949 Programs and data sets used for "Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789-1949" published in Legislative Studies Quarterly. (2020-07-29)
• IUROPA Project The IUROPA Project’s CJEU Database “is the most complete collection of research-ready data about the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and European Union (EU) law.” Developed from several official sources by Stein Arne Brekke et al., the database provides tables of all cases (45,000+), parties (85,000+), proceedings (47,000+), decisions (50,000+), citations (1,000,000+), judges (270+), and more from the court’s inception in 1952 through 2022. That first table, for instance, lists each case’s name, ID, sub-court, year, judgment status, appeal status, and additional details.
• Federal Court Dockets Journalist Matt Clark has compiled a database of more than 350 million docket entries across more than 13 million cases in 180+ federal courts — including the majority of district, appellate, and bankruptcy courts. The records, which Clark collected through the RSS feeds that many federal courts provide, span 2013 to the near-present. Clark’s downloadable database provides information about each docket entry (time filed, entry number, description, and URL), case (number, name, type, and URL), and court. Although the database does not include the docketed documents themselves, they can be retrieved from Docket Alarm (Princeton users only).
• Updating PAJID Scores for State Supreme Court Justices (1970-2019) Calculated ideology scores (on a conservative-liberal continuum) for 1,600+ state supreme court justices from 1970 to 2019. For each justice and year, the dataset provides the justice’s state, last name, political affiliation, the authors’ ideology score estimates, and ideology scores produced by two other research teams.
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Uw law library resources & beyond.

• Empirical Research - Guide from Fordham University Law Library This amazing & well researched guide provides resources for empirical legal research including information on data sets and statistical packages.
• Data and Statistics about the U.S.
• Judicial Statistics, Verdicts & Sentencing Guide by UW Law Library on Judicial Statistics
• State Court Statistical Reports CSP
• OSJ's Statistical Analysis Center - Wisconsin
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• UW New Research Center See the article about this new resource from the Chancellor Rebecca Blank. https://chancellor.wisc.edu/blog/cool-new-research-data-center-comes-to-uw-campus/
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Empirical Legal Research Resources

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Major Empirical Legal Studies Journals

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This page contains information about some of the legal journals that specialize in empirical and statistical analysis.

• American Law and Economics Review The Review is a refereed journal, published twice a year. It maintains the highest scholarly standards, and at the same time endeavours to publish international work that is accessible to the full range of membership in the ALEA, which includes practising lawyers, consulting economics and academic lawyers, and academic economists from around the world. The Review differs from other scholarly economic journals in particular, in that the Editors endeavour to make the material more easily accessible to non-academics.
• Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) fills a gap in the legal and social science literature that has often left scholars, lawyers, and policymakers without basic knowledge of legal systems. Always timely and provocative, studies published in JELS have been covered in leading news outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes Magazine, the Financial Times, and USA Today.
• Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization is an interdisciplinary exercise. It seeks to promote an understanding of many complex phenomena by examining such matters from a combined law, economics, and organization perspective (or a two-way combination thereof).
• Jurimetrics Journal This link opens in a new window Quarterly journal of the American Bar Association Special Committee on Electronic Data Retrieval in cooperation with the Law School and the Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan.
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leiden lawmethods portal

Writing an empirical legal article.

Last update: April 12, 2022

In comparison to a typical article in a law journal that you are perhaps used to, empirical articles – especially those published in social science journals – have a more standardized structure. Such articles typically start with an introduction, then discuss the methods used, subsequently report the findings in a results section, and ultimately discuss the findings and implications in a discussion section (see Figure 1). Below, we will briefly discuss some key points to take into consideration when writing an empirical legal article.

Writing the introduction

In several respects, the introduction of an empirical article mimics that of a typical law journal article. For example, the introduction is used to stress the importance of the research and to entice the reader to continue reading. However, whereas the introductions of articles in law journals are relatively short, the introduction of empirical articles comprises everything up until the methods section. Hence, the introduction then also includes a literature review, sometimes a theoretical framework, perhaps a conceptual framework, the hypotheses and justification/motivation thereof, etc.

Some pointers for the introduction are:

• Start broadly and in easy language when making your opening statements. Take the reader by the hand and guide them towards the key focus of your article. refrain from using jargon and other complex terminology in the first few lines of your introduction.
• Make it clear relatively early in the paper why the problem discussed in your article is important. Answer the “Who cares?” question. This will help make the reader enthusiastic to continue reading. For an empirical legal article, it is also important to explain why the empirical perspective is of added value for your legal research.
• Discuss what we already know about the topic in a carefully curated literature review. It is not always necessary to give a comprehensive overview of everything that has ever been said on the topic, but make sure to discuss/cite the key articles in the field and the most recent insights.
• Make it clear how your research helps the literature (and ultimately society). Are there some pressing questions that are yet to be resolved? Are there contradicting findings that you are hoping to resolve? Are you shedding new light on the assumptions underlying certain legal rules or mechanisms?
• When your goal is to test certain hypotheses, make your way towards the hypotheses and make sure it is clear to the reader why you expect a certain relationship or effect. In other words, ground them in the literature. In case your research is more exploratory in nature, therefore making it hard to formulate specific hypotheses, there is no need to arbitrarily define hypotheses. Just be transparent about the exploratory nature of your research.
• Finally, end your introduction with a short ‘bridge’ to the methods section. What are you going to do you in your study and how does that logically follow from the introduction?

Writing the methods section

The ultimate goal of this section is to make it clear to the reader what you have done. By being transparent, you allow other researchers to verify your findings through conducting the exact same study.

The method section typically discusses:

• The sample that you used, including all relevant demographic information. Take the reader by the hand and explain who (or what) your population is, how you chose your sample and why you made certain sampling decisions (e.g., random sampling, theoretical sampling, saturation).
• The design of the study. Explain what method you used. If you used a quantitative method, explain the variables (independent and dependent) and explain how you measured certain relationships. If you used a qualitative method, explain how you analyzed the data by for example explaining your coding methods.
• Make sure to clarify the procedure you followed, so that your reader knows how you’ve conducted your research. Say something about the set-up of the interview, the structure of the survey, or the design of the experiments, so the reader can understand what it was like to participate in your study.

If you want to publish your empirical research in a law journal or interdisciplinary journal, it is important to explain your methods in such a way that it is understandable for researchers that may not have any experience in empirical research. Some law journals might be a bit hesitant to include an extensive methods section and might want you to move most methodological details to an appendix, or describe them very succinctly in the text. Look for a recent edition of your target journal to see what is common for that journal, and make sure to write with your target audience in mind.

Writing the results section

In this section, you report your analyses and key findings. Regarding the text you use to describe your findings in words, make sure to first state your findings in words, and only then add the statistics. For example: “We hypothesized that judges would dole out harsher punishment if the unintended harm caused was higher. In line with this hypothesis, we found that judges awarded higher damages in the condition where they read the version of the case with the more significant collateral damage versus the cases with only minor side effects. Specifically, in the former condition the average damages awarded was USD 340.345 (SD = 23.763) versus USD 234.567 (SD = 17.345).”

You can already mention whether certain findings were in line with your hypotheses or not, but refrain from elaborately interpreting your findings in this section, as that will be done it the final part of your paper (the discussion section).

If possible, try to visualize your results in graphs and tables. Ideally, one is able to get a full picture of your findings by either looking at the visuals, or by reading the text and ignoring the visuals. It is therefore important to make clear graphs and tables with informative titles.

When publishing your empirical findings in a law journal, it is again important to write with your target audience in mind. Some journals may be hesitant to publish articles that contain a lot of statistical information. It could be that you want to focus on your key findings, and keep most of the statistical tests and number-heavy sections in your footnotes or an appendix. Similar to the methods section, we would say that the more data and information you manage to keep in the main text, the better.

Writing the discussion section

The main goal of this section is to interpret your data and explain what your results may imply. Start off by briefly reiterating the main goals of your research as well as your key findings. Then go on by critically evaluating the methods used and the robustness of your findings. What are some limitations imposed by your chosen method? How valid are your findings? To what extent might they generalize to the real world and other contexts?

Explain how your results fit in the context of your research topic as you explained in your introduction. What knowledge did you add to the existing literature? Explain what your findings mean for debates that are going in into the literature. If you find different results than other scholars, what might explain those differences? Do your findings say anything about how the law works in practice or do they confirm underlying assumptions of legal rules? Also, depending on whether your research has direct implications for (legal) practitioners, you may want to devote a subsection to the practical implications of your findings. In case any normative claims can (and should?) be made based on your findings, you can consider doing so in your article. For more information on this so-called ‘fact-value gap’ (i.e., going from data to normative implications), please see the entry on this topic in the methods portal.

Bem, D. J. (2000). Writing an empirical article. Guide to publishing in psychology journals , 3-16.

Empirical Legal Studies

• Learning About Research Methods
• Selected Books & Articles on Research Methods
• Institutional Review
• Empirical Studies - Topics

Introduction

Business law, criminal law, employment & labor, intellectual property.

• Organizations

This section offers a selection of works with empirical studies of different topics, such as criminal law or judicial behavior. The works here are just a small subset of what's available. For more, search the catalog and periodical databases.

• Empirical Studies Database [IIT Chicago-Kent] From IIT Chicago-Kent's Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property (CESIP). Citations to hundreds of articles. Each record is tagged with IP area (e.g., patent). You can select quantitative, qualitative, or experimental.

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• Research Process

Statistics and Empirical Legal Studies Research Guide

• Finding Existing Datasets & Statistics
• Getting Started
• Research Design
• Data Collection
• Articles on Empirical Methodology in Law
• Selected Books on Empirical Legal Research Methodology
• Selected Books on Empirical Methodology in Other Disciplines
• Searching for Empirical Studies on a Particular Topic

Sources of Existing Datasets & Statistics

• Research Data Archives and Specialized Search Engines
• Courts and the Judiciary
• Crime and Criminal Justice
• Demographics
• Economics, Finance and Trade
• Elections and Public Opinion
• Foreign and International Data
• Government Enforcement, Regulation, and Spending
• Health and Well-being
• Statistics & Probability in Law
• Data Analysis Tools

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When you begin an empirical research project, you should attempt to determine whether the data or statistics you need for your study have already been compiled. The terms "data" and "statistics" are often used interchangeably, but they are not really the same. Data is the raw information from which statistics are created. Datasets are files containing raw data that can be loaded into software like Excel, SAS, or SPSS for analysis. Statistics are the result of analyzing and interpreting data.

If you need statistics (the result of analyzing and interpreting data), you may find a source by using the reference book Statistics Sources  or searching the database Statista . You may also find references to compiled and analyzed statistics by searching for articles, as discussed in our  Articles for Legal and Non-Legal Research Guide . You should also try thinking about who might already produce the type of statistics you want. Maybe there is a relevant government agency, non-governmental organization, think tank, or trade organization that publishes its statistics?

Datasets are often compiled in the context of original empirical research that is reported in scholarly articles. Research articles related to your topic of interest may include a "data availability statement" that tells where and how the data can be accessed. The datasets analyzed in relevant articles may have been archived for future analysis and reuse in one of several  Research Data Archives . You should also try thinking about who might already collect the type of data you want: Maybe there is a relevant government agency, non-governmental organization, think tank, or trade organization that makes its data available?

If you find an existing dataset on your topic, you still need to evaluate the dataset before you use it. Who collected the data, and why? What variables were observed, and how were they defined? What level(s) of data aggregation are provided? (E.g., are the data reported at the level of the individual, family, county, state, country?) Have the researchers who collected the data provided enough information about the collection process for you reproduce it? Look for documentation of the procedures used to collect and code the data. If you cannot find documentation sufficient to allow you to reproduce the data collection process if you wanted to do so, or if variables were defined differently than you would define them, you should probably not rely on that data.

Finding Data-Producing Organizations

The data sources listed in this guide (see the list of subjects on the left) are necessarily limited. For help finding data-producing organizations not listed here, please consult the following resources:

• National Science Foundation Master Government List of Federally Funded R&D Centers
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• Last Updated: May 2, 2024 10:26 AM
• URL: https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/EmpiricalLegalStudies