LAW 7713

Empirical Legal Studies Colloquium

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This colloquium focuses on empirical legal studies, using quantitative method (statistics) to analyze legal issues. Cornell Law School is the birthplace of empirical legal studies and publishes the leading journal in the field, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. In this colloquium, I will spend a few weeks giving a crash course on empirical legal studies. No math or statistics background is presumed for the colloquium, but it surely does not harm to have taken statistics before. My goal is to give students the essential toolkits to understand the empirical papers. As a corporate counsel or a litigator, it is inevitable that you will encounter statistics in your professional career, this colloquium aims to give students basic knowledge about how to understand statistical tables and figures and empirical results more generally. The Colloquium will bring in six external speakers to present their ongoing empirical legal research presenting their empirical works. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in The Path of the Law (1897), boldly predicts that “[f]or the rational study of the law, the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.” The goal of this colloquium is to make students lawyers of the future. Students are evaluated based on 5 response papers and class participation.

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