This award supports mid-career training in statistical methodology for application to legal questions. The training involves organizing two workshops on empirical research in the law, as well as a year of coursework in applied statistics. The workshops and the individual study will foster progress on a series of scholarly projects investigating legal decision making in the United States Supreme Court in the economic context. The underlying goal of the research is to understand the similarities and differences between court decisions in civil rights cases and in cases addressing economic issues.
Formal training in statistics will advance the investigator's individual research on empirical legal questions. It also will enable her to join other legal scholars in bringing scientific and statistical methodology to the law school curriculum. Lawyers, law professors, and judges frequently face difficult empirical questions, but, for the most part, they have no formal training in quantitative research methodology. This mid-career training opportunity will help foster a sub-field in "law and statistics," thereby promoting empirical legal scholarship as well as law school methods courses. These activities are supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and the Law and Social Sciences Program under the Mid-Career Fellowship component of the MMS Program Solicitation.
