With the Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) movement well under way, and increasing numbers of J.D./Ph.D. faculty joining the ranks at many law schools, academic law librarians will increasingly be called upon to support faculty and student research - and in some cases may conduct their own research - in this growing field. But not all law librarians feel familiar with the data sources and analytical concepts relevant to a social sciences approach to legal questions, and law school libraries may be unsure how to design and implement library services that support and encourage such research at their institutions. Two Annual Meeting offerings - an all-day pre-conference workshop on Saturday, hosted at American University School of Law, and an educational program session the next day - dovetailed nicely to address this gap.
The Conducting Empirical Legal Research Workshop was led by Professors Lee Epstein (Northwestern University) and Andrew D. Martin (Washington University in St. Louis), both joint law and political science faculty active in the ELS field. The eight-hour session provided a condensed overview of many aspects of the research design process, analytical concepts, and statistical resources and methodologies employed in ELS scholarship. Spanning much of the material Epstein and Martin usually present during a three-day workshop for faculty, and examining concepts and analytical frameworks used more commonly in sociology and related fields than in traditional legal research, the workshop by necessity only skimmed lightly over the surface of topics at hand.
However, the workshop provided a good review of or introduction to some of the basic terminology (e.g., independent and dependent variables, the null hypothesis) and other fundamental concepts (e.g., reliability versus validity of data, statistical significance and confidence intervals, regression analysis) used by ELS scholars in designing research approaches and performing data analysis. Epstein broke down the typical research project into three phases: project design, collection and coding of data, and data analysis. She highlighted a few off-the-shelf sources of statistics on topics of interest to legal scholars, but focused mostly on resources for finding datasets - large raw data collections used by many ELS scholars. She also introduced participants to one of the major data analysis software tools, Stata, used widely in academic research.
Martin’s portion of the workshop, which occupied much of the afternoon, delved in even greater detail into the technical aspects of statistical analysis, applying various Stata features to data drawn from typical ELS datasets. These examples were used not only to demonstrate various types of simple tabulations and graphical presentations of data made possible by the software, but also to illustrate some of the analytical concepts employed in ELS. Especially for participants who never took a basic statistics course, this portion of the program might have presented a particular challenge - dense, complex material presented at fairly high speed.
Epstein and Martin have now led this law librarian workshop twice - at the 2008 and 2009 conferences - and workshop organizers Amy Taylor (Duke University School of Law Library) and Jill Duffy (Supreme Court of the United States Library) noted that space sold out quickly both years. Assuming this popular workshop is offered again, those planning to attend next year’s Annual Meeting should consider enrolling early to reserve a space in this program.
The fee for the workshop, at $240, was a bit steep in the current economy. But participants who come prepared for a fast-paced, intense, and information-packed program will walk away with a better understanding of the purposes and methods of ELS research from the perspective of experienced, expert faculty engaged in the field. Participants will also learn some basics of the analytical framework and vocabulary that should improve their ability to communicate effectively with ELS researchers. Finally, participants in this workshop will gain exposure to some of the specific tools and resources for finding and manipulating the types of data frequently used in ELS literature.
The Understanding the Mean program was a good complement to the workshop. Focusing on the strengths, skill set, and educational background of the “average” law librarian, the session addressed one question that was left open by the workshop: What can academic law librarians - who may lack advanced training in sociology, political science, or statistics - do to foster and support ELS efforts, and what tasks or projects are probably beyond the scope of the law library’s role?
Program coordinator Darla Jackson (Oklahoma City University Law Library) started off the program by defining ELS and noting some of the factors in its growth and continuing relevance in legal scholarship. She also suggested several web/blog, journal, and other resources that the average law librarian can use to bone up on ELS and to keep current on developments in the field. She pointed out opportunities for law libraries that fit well within the traditional categories of library service, including performing literature reviews, identifying funding and training resources, finding data sources, and acting as liaison with subject area and data librarians, other university faculty, and administrative offices involved in human subject research oversight.
David A. Hollander (Princeton University’s Firestone Library) got a laugh right off the bat by admitting he never even took a college “intro to statistics” course. His presentation nevertheless showed how a librarian without extensive training in statistics can support ELS research. He also emphasized a few distinctions between the typical research issues that may arise in other types of legal inquiry and the information used in ELS, including the fact that in ELS much higher volumes of information are often used, and research may not be limited to a single doctrinal field. He also noted that, while locating existing datasets may be a familiar task, compiling data is a very different function. This presents a particular problem in ELS because there are many areas of law for which, at least compared to the social sciences, there is very little out there in the way of raw data. The work of compiling these datasets may take decades; the task of coding data about legal topics, moreover, can involve both relatively simple variables and more “mushy” data requiring judgment calls. Hollander posited that law librarians can be involved in such efforts, but cautioned that these are largely untested waters in most law schools.
As a political science doctoral candidate working within a law library, Mirya Holman (Duke University School of Law Library) provided yet another perspective. With graduate-level experience in statistical methods, but without law or library degrees, Holman was hired specifically to support ELS scholarship, thus offering another model for libraries to provide research support, by splitting services according to skill set. Holman suggested that academic law librarians are well-positioned to assist with at least four aspects of research support: training student research assistants, including developing standard protocols to ensure that RAs are consistent in the recording or coding of data; acting as liaisons with other libraries, faculty, and graduate students with expertise in handling data projects; locating current research and existing raw data sources; and helping with the presentation of data. Along with the background and current awareness resources mentioned by Jackson, Holman suggested attending faculty workshops and job talks involving ELS as a way of networking and keeping up to date on ELS trends and scholarship. Program handouts offered by Holman included a bibliography and FAQs about Institutional Review Boards and Human Subjects Protocol.
The final speaker, Matthew M. Morrison (Cornell University Law Library) reviewed Cornell’s historic contributions to ELS, including a plug for the leading Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and yet another tool for researching current developments in ELS scholarship: the Empirical Research Group’s ELS Bibliography. The latter, a joint Cornell/UCLA database project, indexes ELS articles appearing in the flagship law reviews of top-40 law schools and some 40 other law and economics and similarly themed journals. Morrison also spoke to some of the issues that academic law libraries face in choosing a service model to support ELS scholarship, noting that the programs at Cornell and Duke resulted largely from the activism and support of vocal faculty contingents. An open question he identified was that of infrastructure: compared to social science departments where “armies of RAs” are available, the law school curriculum and student population provide fewer resources for both the grunt work of collecting and coding data and the higher-level functions of checking and analyzing it. Will law students fill the gap, or will social sciences graduate students need to be trained to perform basic legal research, and who will be responsible for providing this training?
The session as a whole provided both encouragement and practical leads on information sources for academic law librarians working to add ELS research support to their array of services. The session, taken together with the workshop, also presented ample food for thought about the institutional issues that academic law libraries will face in the future as the ELS movement continues to grow and evolve. The two offerings combined well to address and explore the many practical, theoretical, and infrastructural implications of the ELS scholarship and the role of academic law libraries in its development.