An interdisciplinary workshop will systematically probe how the many insights from the empirical study of law, courts, and judging have direct normative implications concerning how policy and institutions ought to be designed and executed. This workshop will bring together leading empirical researchers and will focus on a breadth of topics in law and courts. Empirical political scientists who study law and courts have not always made their work accessible to relevant policymakers. However, contemporary research on the context of the judicial process has produced numerous insights that could be useful in policymaking. The question guiding the workshop is: How can these empirical findings be used to make judgments about how judicial processes, institutions, and policies ought to be designed, operated, and executed? The PIs will produce an edited volume from this workshop that will disseminate research in a framework that could prove useful to policymakers. The workshop's intellectual merit rests in engaging in interdisciplinary field-building that will highlight how academic, empirical research can be directly relevant to broader policy debates. The workshop's broader impact would be in demonstrating how empirical research is directly relevant to policymakers and the public. With appropriate dissemination, it could contribute to efficient and effective judicial institutions and processes. The workshop will bring together a truly diverse and interdisciplinary mix of scholars, including senior and junior men and women, some from Ph.D. granting departments and some from B.A. institutions.
We held our workshop on the Normative Implications of Empirical Research on Law and Courts on May 10 at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Public policy often does not take into account scholarly research on relevant topics, which is partly the fault of empirically-minded scholars showing little interest in having their research be accessible to broader audiences of policymakers and the media. This is unfortunate since contemporary research by social scientists emphasizing the political context of the judicial process has produced numerous substantive insights. The question that guided the workshop was: How can these empirical findings be used to make judgments about how judicial processes, institutions, and policies ought to be designed, operated, and executed? The workshop brought together empirical researchers—both faculty and graduate students—to discuss related questions and focused on the following topics: (1) judicial selection, (2) judicial decision making, (3) the rule of law, (4) institutional legitimacy, and (5) race, gender, and judging. As we noted in our proposal, we invited scholars from political science, law, and sociology. We also held a competition for graduate students and received 41 proposals, from which we selected 6. The full list of participants (and their essays) can be found on our conference website: https://nierworkshop.wordpress.com/. In the weeks since the conference, we have been working on an edited volume. We sent the proposal to 6 publishers and are waiting to hear back from them. We have also sent comments to the authors and the authors are in the process of revising their essays in lights of both our comments and the discussions that occurred at the workshop.
