Research Methodology Courses in Law Schools

As a follow-up to Jason’s post about teaching empiricism, it could be a helpful service of the ELS Blog to compile a list of the research methodology courses taught within law schools. Naturally, traditional legal research courses do not count for these purposes. (We don’t need a list of 180 first-year legal research courses, even if they really are empirical.)

Anyone who would like to help along the process of compiling this list can post a comment or e-mail me directly (wford@uchicago.edu), preferably with a link to a course description or even a syllabus. Since course catalogs do not always reflect what is actually being taught, these responses would be of great help in figuring out what is really going on within the law schools. I’ll post the list sometime soon and update it as needed.

Comments

[Ron Wright]

Wake Forest just started offering a survey course, "Analytical Methods for Lawyers," based on the casebook by Jackson, Kaplow, Shavell, Viscusi, and Cope. A team of four faculty members teaches the course, and it includes units on game theory, accounting, finance, and (most relevant for ELS purposes) statistical analysis.

[Michael Heise]

I've taught "Empirical Methods for Lawyers" (3 cr.) for years (though my colleague Ted Eisenberg taught it this year). The survey course is designed to introduce law students to some of the most basic and important quantitative tools of the social sciences that inform many private and public law areas. The first part introduces students to general statistical principles. The second part integrates these principles and basic empirical tools into various legal areas. I establish SPSS site licenses for the class, but do not require any actual computational work or problem sets. For classroom teaching purposes I've opted for SPSS as students describe it as more accessible.