Guest blogging at ELS Blog, Tracey George has posted a ranking of law schools based on the prevalance of empirical legal studies at each school. The relevant variables used to construct the rankings were (1) number of Ph.D.'s in the social sciences on the faculty; (2) number of faculty with joint appointments in the social sciences; and (3) number of articles per capita retrieved on Westlaw using a search term designed to capture the term "statistically significant" or a substitute. Under this methodology, Illinois is ranked #6, tied with the University of Chicago.
Now, I think Illinois is a great school, regardless of the methodology used to measure greatness, and empirical legal studies has a significant and substantial presence here at the College of Law. (I have sat in a course this semester on Quantitative Methods taught by Jen Robbennolt, Tom Ulen and Bob Lawless). However, I can't help but note one irony in the methodology as applied here. Although Illinois has its share of Ph.D's with joint appointments who write articles with the words "statistically significant" (e.g., Robbennolt and Ulen), Illinois has a great many non-Ph.D.'s who write empirical articles (e.g., Lawless, Fennell, Hyman, and Ribstein). In addition, Illinois has a wonderful concentration of Ph.D.'s with joint appointments in philosophy and history who write important articles that crunch ideas, not numbers. Therefore, Illinois did well under this methodology not because of significant specialization but because of depth in several fields.
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1. Posted by Mike Guttentag on October 2, 2006 @ 11:49 | Permalink
On a related note, I thought it was shocking how rarely the words statistically significant appeared in law review articles. A school that had this phrase appear in 1% of its articles would be among the top ten law schools in the country. The discussion that followed Tracey’s post pointed out limitations in relying on this particular phrase as evidence of empirical research. But still: the average law review article is probably 25,000 words. This suggests to me that, despite the excitement in some circles, legal scholarship is still far, far from relying on evidence-based argumentation.
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