ELS, L&E, etc.

Call for Papers: 1st Malaccan Workshop on the Study of Law, Economics and Business

2011-06-24T02:11:00.004+01:00

I'm currently leading a Law, Economics and Business SIG (special interest group) at the Faculty of Business and Law, Multimedia University. One of the events the LEB-SIG is organising this year is the 1st Malaccan Workshop on the Study of Law, Economics and Business. The call for papers is out, and submissions are due on 31 August 2011. For more information, visit http://fbl.mmu.edu.my/leb-workshop2011.html.

When cheap law is bad law

2010-12-19T00:37:00.005Z

When cheap law makes it easy to externalise its cost on third parties, it's time to do something. In this case, the court used a practice direction to raise the cost of law to improve efficiency. Strange, but true.

Tim Gowers on Open Source Mathematics

2010-05-16T15:44:00.003+01:00

Tim Gowers was at the University of Manchester's School of Mathematics on Friday to deliver the second Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Lecture. The title of his lecture was "Open Source Mathematics". Basically, Tim recounted his experience in an on-going blogging project called Polymath, that he started in late January this year to publicly and collaboratively solve some moderately difficult mathematical problems online. What is interesting about this project is that when a paper is written up, it will be published under a pseudonym instead of in the names of all contributors, or even major contributors. In fact, through out the history of science, and mathematics in particular, there have been occasions where a pseudonym was used. For example, William Sealy Gosset's Student is probably the most famous mathematical pseudonym. A further example of a more collaborative nature would be Nicolas Bourbaki in the 20th century. The Internet has certainly changed the way we do collaborative research. No longer do we need to be at physical proximity to work together, or to wait on weeks for the mail to arrive. The Internet has made instanteneous and global collaboration possible. As the Polymath Project shows, it has also opened up mathematical research, which traditionally is considered the province of academic mathematicians, to outside participants. And this has made mathematics all the more richer.

27th Annual Conference of the European Association of Law and Economics

2010-01-11T22:38:00.000Z

The 27th Annual Conference of the European Association of Law and Economics will take place in Paris, at the Université Pathèon-Assas, on September 23-25, 2010. This is going to be the first visit of the EALE in Paris. The dateline for submission is 28 February 2010.

Asian Law and Economics Assoiation Annual Conference 2010

2010-01-11T22:29:00.003Z

The sixth annual conference of the Asian Law and Economics Association will be held on 23 and 24 August 2010 at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. The call for papers is now out. Dateline for submission is 15 April 2010.

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies 2010

2010-01-11T22:26:00.001Z

The call for papers for the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at the Yale Law School on 5th and 6th November 2010 is out. Submission dateline is 2 July 2010.

Anthony Ogus on Law and Economics in the Legal Academy or What I Should Have Said to Discipulus

2010-01-06T20:27:00.005Z

My colleague and mentor at the University of Manchester, Prof. Anthony Ogus, recently presented a paper at a conference at the University of Toronto titled
"Law and Economics in the Legal Academy or What I Should Have Said to Discipulus". I totally agree with him on the point that for law and economics to have any impact and relevant to legal scholarship in general, it has to be written in a non-technical manner. But I disagree that for the special class of people known as law and economics scholars (even if they work in a law school), mathematical knowledge, even for comprehension, is not necessary. He does agree that statistical skills are important and useful.

Google Calendar

2009-12-23T12:25:00.009Z

I am a big fan of Google, and one of the tools that I like very much is Google Calendar. It allows me to create publicly accessible iCal calendars without having to run my own server or hosting account. Here is an unofficial example which I created for the methods@Manchester seminar series organised by Prof. Angela Dale of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research.

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies 2009 Webcasts

2009-11-23T13:52:00.002Z

For those of us who missed this year's Empirical Legal Studies conference at the University of Southern California, there are recorded webcasts which can be viewed here: http://lawweb.usc.edu/cels/webcast.cfm. I hope the organisers will keep it there for posperity sake.

SLS Best Paper Prize 2009

2009-11-04T22:04:00.004Z

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Lindsay Stirton and his co-author T.T. Arvind for winning this year's Society of Legal Scholars annual conference best paper prize. Their paper, titled "Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explain the reception of the Code Napoléon in Germany", uses an innovative technique called Qualitative Comparative Analysis to analyse factors underlying the adoption of the Code Napoleon by different German states in the 19th century.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis, or more commonly known by its abbreviation QCA, is a structured qualitative technique used in sociology and political science. It was developed by Charles Ragin, a Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona, in the 1980s. As far as I know, Lindsay and Arvind's paper is the first attempt of using QCA in the study of law.

Using Field Experiments in Economics

2009-09-09T15:12:00.001+01:00

Greg Mankiw points to two interesting talks on field experiments by John List and Michael Kremer.

Tom Ulen on the Future Trajectory of Law and Economics

2009-06-23T01:45:00.003+01:00

I have just returned from the 5th Annual Conference of the Asian Law and Economics Association held at Seoul, Korea. Tom Ulen was one of the two keynote speakers at the conference, the other being Isaac Ehrlich.

A few points stood up from Tom's talk. Law schools should recast their role as the place which teaches and researches social governance, since law is viewed as an important tool for social goverance. More importantly, law is the one field which opens its door to other social sciences, while other fields are having territorial fights. Tom cites the example of his institution, the Law School at the University of Illinois, as evidence. All recent faculty recruits now have a Ph.D, and since there are no Ph.Ds in law from American law schools, all these Ph.Ds are in other social sciences such as economics, sociology, political science and philosophy. The fact is, the American law school is the place where scholars with diverse academic background converge to jointly think about social issues.

Another point Tom raised in a discussion was the potential prominence of the Empirical Legal Studies movement, potentially surpassing Law and Economics. Unlike the Law and Economics movement which has its own ideological baggage, the ELS movement is to a large extent ideologically free. Sociologists, political scientists, economists and statisticians could all contribute to the ELS movement with their own techniques, knowledge and underlying philosophy with less conflict. I foresee that ELS could be more important in British law schools than Law and Economics could ever dream of. For example, the Facult of Law in UCL under Dame Hazel Genn has renamed their Centre for Socio-Legal Studies to Centre for Empirical Legal Studies to reflect the current shift of emphasis.

Galileo Galilei

2009-02-18T16:29:00.004Z

I've just started my sabbatical research leave. One of the things I would like to do, apart from working on my writing projects, is to read books at the peripheral of my research interest, which at the moment is mathematics. For a starter, I read Atle Naess's Galileo Galilei: When the World Stood Still. Since this is not meant to be a book review, what I can say is that the one lesson from the book is this: Don't make unnecessary enemies in academia, for otherwise, it will come back to haunt you!

Preliminary Mathematics for Economics

2008-05-05T13:07:00.004+01:00

I'm compiling free resources on the Internet on basic mathematics for students who are going into law and economics research. So far, I've found these :

Get them while they're still there.

SLSA 2008 Manchester

2008-03-18T23:40:00.003Z

Today marks the first day of the Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference held at Manchester. The conference is organised by the Manchester School of Law, and I must congratulate the organising committee for a job well done.

We also saw the launch of the Legal Empirical Research Support Network website. A brief introduction was given by Martin Partington who was instrumental in getting the network. I shall be keeping a close eye on the progress of this support network.

Get Rich Quick

2008-02-29T13:55:00.003Z

Words of wisdom from Hal Varian at the Freakonomics blog:

If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on.

Practical Impossibility versus Scientific Impossibility

2007-11-19T11:22:00.000Z

Recently I gave a lecture which touched on the differences between traditional legal research and scientific research. One point I made was that lawyers work on severe time constraint, and therefore have to give advice or make submissions which are just good enough within the limits of their resources. On the other hand, scientists have a longer time horizon, and therefore might be interested in solving a problem which takes a very long time. One example I gave was the solution to the Fermat's last theorem which took more than 350 years.

One consequence of adopting the lawyers approach is that legal scholars tend to make claims without taking the pains of obtaining scientifically acceptable evidence. Furthermore, claims make by empirical legal scholars which do not fit their intuitive understanding are dismissed as wrong, and suggestions are made that the empirical exercise is ill-conceived and has to be abandoned.

What this boils down to is that traditional legal scholars take practical impossibility as equivalent to an outright impossibility. If conducting a research is practically impossible, it should never be pursued. A legal scholar which takes a more scientific approach might see the problem differently. He might want to first know whether a solution to his problem is scientifically impossible. If there are suggestions that a solution is scientifically possible, but that the current techniques makes such solution practically impossibility, then the researcher will have to further develop the technique or methodology in order to come to a solution. Therefore, to a scientific researcher, only scientifically impossible problems are to be avoided. The solution to practical impossibility is to discover a better technique, or to refine an existing technique, until it is good enough to overcome the initial practical impossibility.

What this teaches us is that we should not dismiss off hand claims in empirical legal research which do not concur with our current understanding. They might be wrong, but they are wrong because the techniques are crude, and not that it is scientifically impossible to come up with the right answer. Most scientific ventures start off badly because the initial methodology is crude. But over time, as techniques are refined, the scientific approach will give us better answers compared to the intuitive approach. Legal reseachers using the scientific approach therefore will have to work doubly hard in improving their techniques in order to overcome the scepticism of traditional researchers.

Call for Papers: EMLE Mid-Term Meeting, Ghent, 15 February 2008

2007-11-05T23:00:00.000Z

Dear Colleague,

The annual Midterm Meeting of the Erasmus Mundus European Master Programme in Law and Economics will be held on February 15th and 16th, 2008 at the Law School of the Ghent University. On Friday 15th February, a Law and Economics Conference will be organised providing slots for 15 presentations of a paper. Those interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a copy of a full paper or an abstract (preferably attached in an e-mail message) to:

Dr. Jef De Mot
University of Ghent
Department of Foundations and History of Law
Universiteitsstraat 4
9000 Ghent, BELGIUM
Email: Jef.DeMot@Ugent.be

Cc:
Nancy Van Nuffel
University of Ghent
Department of General Jurisprudence and History of Law
Universiteitsstraat 4
9000 Ghent, BELGIUM
Tel.: 0032-9-2646807
Email: Nancy.VanNuffel@Ugent.be

Papers may be on any topic within the field of Law and Economics, but preferential treatment will be given to the following topics: regulation (including impact assessment), corporate law and litigation. The submission deadline is Tuesday December 18th, 2007.

The members of the Scientific Committee are:
Prof. dr. Boudewijn Bouckaert
Prof. dr. Ben Depoorter
Dr. Jef De Mot
Drs. Manu Dierickx-Vissers

Warmest regards,
Prof. dr. Boudewijn Bouckaert
Coordinator Mundus European Master Law and Economics
Director Department General Jurisprudence and History of Law
University of Ghent

The Fall and Rise of Development Economics

2007-10-30T20:02:00.001Z

Continuing my search for an answer to the question of whether mathematics is essential to economics, I've just finished reading Paul Krugman's 1994 article titled "The Fall and Rise of Development Economics", which brought tears to my eyes. If only someone had brought this article to my attention years ago.

Maths are for Dummies

2007-10-30T17:35:00.000Z

I am still in the process of being convinced that maths are useful in economics generally, and law and economics in particular. I am also opened to be convinced the other way round.

So far, I have found the article by Hans Brems published in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1975 titled "Marshall on Mathematics" to be an interesting read.

A few months ago, Dani Rodrik has also discussed the question on his blog on why economists use maths:

So I tell them a story about Sir W. Arthur Lewis. When I was a master's student myself at Princeton, I once attended a lecture that he gave on real wages, the commodity terms of trade, and North-South income differentials. The talk had no math in it. One of the younger faculty members of the economics department was sitting in the front row, and I could see him scratching his head in confusion throughout the talk. A few minutes after Sir Arthur was done, this young professor jumped up in excitement and went up to the board. "Now I get it!" he exclaimed and began to scribble some equations on the board. "This is the equation which relates to what you said in the first part of your talk, and this one expresses the other, and here is a third... and now finally we have three independent equations that determines your three endogenous variables..." Sir Arthur kept on his bemused smile as his lecture was explained to him in mathematical terms.

The moral of the story is that if you are smart enough to be a Nobel-prize winning economist maybe you can do without the math, but the rest of us mere mortals cannot. We need the math to make sure that we think straight--to ensure that our conclusions follow from our premises and that we haven't left loose ends hanging in our argument.

In other words, we use math not because we are smart, but because we are not smart enough.

We are just smart enough to recognize that we are not smart enough. And this recognition, I tell our students, will set them apart from a lot of people out there with very strong opinions about what to do about poverty and underdevelopment.

It says, I might just be one of the dummies.

Students Learn Better When The Numbers Don't Talk And Dance

2007-10-28T08:48:00.000Z

Found this rather old entry on ScienceDaily.

"Researchers found that when college students were taught an artificial form of mathematics and physics, they learned it better when it was presented using simple, abstract symbols ... rather than more visually engaging and concrete 3-D objects that moved dynamically on a computer screen."

This finding seems to support the idea that it is more effective to teach law and economics using abstract mathematical concepts than 'talking' about some intuitive economic concepts with minimal math.

What constitutes good legal scholarship?

2007-10-26T13:26:00.000+01:00

Harvard Law School's professor Daryl Levinson give advice to aspiring law professors among his students. Some of my favourite quotes are:

... what exactly law professors do: "Scholarship and teaching, in that order."
Q: What constitutes good legal scholarship?
A: Legal scholarship is very heterogeneous. There is less doctrinal scholarship these days, although there is still a fair amount of it. Increasingly there are policy papers and interdisciplinary papers. The tools that students are formally taught in law school tend to be inadequate, since students basically just learn case analysis. You likely need to do more than that, but you can only get a sense of what "that" is by reading scholarship. Most would say your best bet is to be interdisciplinary.
... practical legal experience is not a good predictor of scholarly ability,
and, ... "is pretty nearly disqualifying."
Approximately twenty-five percent of entry-level professors hired last year had Ph.D.'s ... [Blogger's note: There's no Ph.D. programme in law in the US, which means that all these Ph.D.'s are likely to be in fields other than law.]

A few basic tips on studying mathematics

2007-10-24T11:15:00.000+01:00

I thought I would share these useful tips on studying mathematics which I found on another blog.

CBSE Papers : Few basic tips to study mathematics
1. Ask questions if you are unsure about the formulas and don’t be ashamed, many people may have some type of difficulty when it comes to math.

2. Study each formula carefully, in order words spend twice the amount of time studying and learning math equations from the time you are in class. Ex: if your class meets for one hour spend two hours away from class studying time on math problems. This does not mean you have to spend two solid hours studying, break your time up in 30 minute intervals.

3. If there is someone else in the class who has a better understanding of the content get with them for one on one tutoring or a small study group. This seems to help a lot when your peers tutor you and it may be fun. Keep your group around 4 to 5 members and do this early on if problems start to arise, smaller groups seem to get more done.

4. Always, always let your instructor or teacher know you are having problems. This will allow you some leverage that they are aware of any problems you may be having and may devote some additional help or sources of help to assist you.

5. You may want to study each theory or formula with a friend by conversing what you have learned with them. I found this to be very helpful.

6. Write down notes as the problems are being explained. And always try taking courses in sequential order if you can. For example take pre-algebra before algebra and algebra I before algebra II and trigonometry, well you get it.

Statistics Helpdesk

2007-10-23T22:00:00.000+01:00

My soon-to-be colleague Lindsay Stirton points out to me an innovative and potentially useful service funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It is a free statistics helpdeak provided by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the Lancaster University. UK academics could register themselves to obtain "help and guidance on statistical matters, including questionnaire design, statistical analysis of data, use of statistical packages, design of experiments and data display." More information can be found here. Lindsay tells me that over at the University of East Anglia, a similar walk-up service is also available to staff and students.

YouTube University

2007-10-23T21:21:00.000+01:00

Techdirt is running an interesting article and links to more interesting articles on open courseware and free video lectures on the Internet. Personally I have always been a big fan of lifelong learning and find that some of these video lectures to be particularly useful for picking new knowledge on the side without having to be there at MIT or UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon. In fact there are databases of more of these: Online Education Database and OER Commons. Legal scholars trying to pick up statistical skills might find something useful there.

Call for Papers: SLSA 2008 Conference: Maths, Statistics and Scientific Legal Methodologies stream

2007-10-21T23:36:00.000+01:00

The University of Manchester will be organising the Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference next year from 18 to 20 March 2008. A preliminar call for papers is up right now. I have volunteered to organise a stream titled "Maths, Statistics and Scientific Legal Methodologies". This is meant to be a forum for discussion on how maths and statistics can be incorporated into a scientific way of legal research. At the same time, our head of the law school, Professor Frank Stephen is organising the Law and Economics stream. We welcome early expressions of interest for presenting a paper. For further information, please visit the website at http://www.law.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/events/SLSA2008/conveners.html. Kindly spread the word around.

Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky

2007-10-10T08:36:00.000+01:00

Earlier last month, I submitted my entry to Paul Caron and Bill Henderson call's for advice in response for advice for Erwin Chemirinsky who is going to be the founding dean of the new law school at UC Irvine. I wrote:

I would like to see a law school promote scientific methodology in legal research. In Chemerinsky's case, that would mean that he plans towards offering a doctoral programme in scientific legal research in a couple of years' time. His hiring policy will have to reflect this aim, by hiring less faculty who do traditional ("black letter law") legal research and more faculty who have interest and training in scientific methods such as political science, economics, mathematics, and statistics. It is also time to bring law and economics out of the domain of economics and firmly implant it as part of the methodology of legal research, like what happened to political science in the 1970s and later. All law schools have as their main aim the training of lawyers. What will be truly innovative is a law school that trains legal policy makers.

Looking at all the entries, it seems like only mine concerns with a doctoral programme. All the others are about enhancing the traditional (what we in the UK call undergraduate) law programme.

Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Amsterdam

2007-10-09T16:17:00.000+01:00

I saw this at the ELS blog. It's nice to know that the Amsterdam Center is doing all those things that I think should be done, such as a doctoral programme which includes a two-year economics training at the Tinbergen Institute, and now a chair in ELS. Way to good, Amsterdam!

Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE) at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (www.acle.nl), is a joint initiative of the economics and law faculties of the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality research in the fields at the interface of law and economics. Located in the heart of Amsterdam’s old city, the ACLE presently associates around twenty scholars in both disciplines, ranging from full professor to PhD students. The Center's main focus areas are: Competition & Regulation, Corporate Governance & Law, and Foundations of Law & Economics.

Vacancy for the position of (Full) Professor of Empirical Legal Studies (1,0 Fte)

The purpose of the Chair is to strengthen empirical research in law and economics, and particularly the application of legal analysis, statistical inference and economic modeling to fundamental areas of national and international law ranging from tort liability, property and intellectual property, contracts, criminal law, to law enforcement and litigation.

The prospective Chair-holder should be an established researcher with international standing reflected in high-level publications in top law & economics journals. We envision a researcher that has a rigorous knowledge of relevant fields of law combined with econometrical and statistical skills. The principal tasks are active engagement in research, teaching and course development, and the supervision of PhD students and post docs.

The Chair in empirical legal studies is a full time tenured position in the Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE). The formal appointment of the Chair will be within the Faculty of Law.

While a senior position is available, the position could also be filled at a more junior level, i.e. a tenure-track appointment that could mature over time to a full professor.

Further information

For further information, please contact Prof. Arnoud Boot (A.W.A.Boot@uva.nl, +31 20 525 4162) or Dr. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci (gdarimat@uva.nl, +31 (0) 20 525 7157).

A further description and instructions on how to apply are available on www.english.uva.nl/vacancies. The deadline for application is 15 December 2007.

Princeton Companion to Mathematics

2007-10-06T12:45:00.000+01:00

Being trained as a librarian, I am a sucker for reference works. So it looks like I'm going to cough up some more money for the forthcoming Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Within my limited ability, the sample chapters seem to be quite readable. I'm certainly going to add this 1000-page odd tome to my shelf. Go here for instructions on how to get access to the sample chapters.

CFP: 17th Silvaplana Workshop on Political Economy, Switzerland, 2008

2007-10-06T11:47:00.000+01:00

Call for Papers

The 17th Silvaplana Workshop on Political Economy will be held on 23-27 July 2008. A call for papers is currently underway. Further information is found here.

CFP: European Public Choice Society annual meeting 2008, Jena, Germany

2007-10-06T11:43:00.001+01:00

Call for Papers

The European Public Choice Society will be holding their annual meeting for 2008 in Jena, Germany from 27-30 March 2008. Further information on submitting a paper is available here.

Math Geeks in Law

2007-10-06T10:18:00.000+01:00

Although I can't profess to be a math wizard, I do like maths since young. To foster a closer ties among like-minded math aficionados in law, I have set up a Math Geeks in Law group in Facebook. The direct like to the group's homepage is here. But you'll have to first be a Facebook member before you can join.

No Two Standards

2007-10-02T22:34:00.000+01:00

I have come to believe that, much as we legal scholars would like to object to, there are no two standards to law and economics scholarship. By this I mean that journal editors and referees will use the same standard for evaluating a piece of work irrespective of whether the author was trained in economics or in law.

If this 'no two standards' hypothesis holds true, then it would greatly disadvantage scholars trained in law, unless they too have undergone the necessary training in economics. Increasingly law and economics scholarship means either proof by way of mathematical modelling or hypothesis testing by empirical methods. A law and economics scholar nowadays will have to use either maths or statistics. The probability that a purely descriptive work being accepted for publication is fairly slim. Unless, of course, the author is already well-known in the law and economics circle.

Maps and Models

2007-09-30T21:36:00.000+01:00

A map is a simplified representation of the physical world. Similarly a model is a simplified representation of the social world. We don't want our maps to be overly detailed and too realistic, for a realistic map is an exact 1:1 scale replication of the real world. We want our maps to have just enough details to perform the intended function and no more. Likewise, we don't want to have a realistic model which includes every nuance and detail of the real world, for our model will become overly complicated and unfeasible. We need our models to be as simple as they can to do the job and no more.

The writer and the researcher

2007-09-25T07:50:00.001+01:00

The writer should aim to write at the appropriate level to his intended readers. He should convey just enough information to convince his readers of his ideas. He should use the correct type and level of language as his readers are accustomed to. Thus a high school's text is written differently from a primary school's text, even though both deals with some knowledge about the earth. Similarly a text written for a specialist should be different from that for the general public.

A researcher on the other hand should strive to attain the highest competency and use the best tools to analyse his subject. He should strive to achieve the highest rigour in his methodology. Although a research might write up his findings in a simple way for the general reading public, or in the most technical language for the scholarly journal, his writing style is irrelevant to the rigour of his research.

The scientific legal researcher is best to bear this distinction in mind. In terms of methodology, he should strive for the highest rigour and competency. But he should write out his findings according to the types of readership. To the layman or the traditional lawyer, he should write in the simplest non-technical form. To his scholarly peers, he should exhibit and produce proofs and analyses of the highest standard. There are just no two ways to it.

Giants

2007-09-25T07:42:00.000+01:00

In science, each generation seek to surpass the previous one. This is because they stand on the shoulders of their ancestor's giants. However in traditional legal research, this is not the case. The same old methodology is being used to look at new cases, new laws, new conflicts, new issues, and new environments, but there is no innovation in methodological-wise. And we observe no progress in legal research methodology.

Law and economics by legal scholars: A demand or a supply problem?

2007-09-19T18:21:00.000+01:00

Tom Ulen and Nuno Garoupa in a forthcoming paper titled "The Market for Legal Innovation: Law and Economics in Europe and the United States" argued that the lack for law and economics scholarship in Europe by legal scholars is generally, among other tings, a demand problem because of lack of competitive forces in legal scholarship. I must agree that indeed the demand for law and economics scholarship in Europe is not very high, and certainly way below what is happening in the US.

However, I also strongly believe that the lack of reception of law and economics by legal scholars, is actually a supply problem. This is in fact due to the nature of postgraduate training for economics, as well as law, in the United Kingdom. My numerous encounters with Ph.D. law students trying to use mathematics and economics, both at Manchester where I am teaching and at various conferences I have attended, are testaments to the fact that there is no extreme shortage of demand for law and economics training. On the other hand, what I found is that there are many structural and institutional barriers for lawyers to receive proper training in the economics methodology.

At the moment, the only route that I know of for an aspiring legal scholar is to attend a doctoral programme in economics in the United States. This is because only in the United States is a doctoral degree in economics a first degree, i.e. students are taught economics and mathematics from afresh, with no assumption or requirement that they have taken a bachelor's degree in economics before.

The situation in Europe, and the UK in particular, is different. To enter into a Ph.D. programme in economics, students must have a Master's degree in economics. To get a Master's degree in economics, students must have a bachelor's degree in economics. Thus, for a legal researched to acquire sufficient knowledge of economics and the economic methodology while pursuing a doctoral degree, he would have to first spend at least another four years for a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in economics. This is a very costly and risky option for any law and economics scholar coming from a law school. The opportunity cost of acquiring knowledge of economics is in fact very high, compared to the alternative of just undertaking traditional law research.

There are a few economic departments which allow a student with a bachelor's degree in other fields to take a one-year diploma in economics course before continuing to a Master's degree. However, this is not common.

It is not easy to imagine economics departments suddenly changing their syllabus to accommodate the needs of law graduates. Therefore, the task of training proper economics methodology falls on law schools, if they are interested in promoting law and economics scholarship. Law schools should design a training programme which incorporates the core components of the economic methodology, such as one similar to the first year's Ph.D. programme in the United States. This would then certainly go a long way in helping legal scholars in Europe in learning and applying the law and economics methodology, and thereby increase the reception of law and economics in Europe, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Introduction to Statistics

2007-09-19T08:17:00.000+01:00

Learn statistics on the Internet. Go here.

Scientific Legal Research

2007-09-19T07:39:00.000+01:00

I've been 'googling' the term 'legal science' and have historical usages of that term which has no relation at all to what we understand as science. Henceforth, I will use the alternative term 'scientific legal research' to denote what I believe, namely the use of mathematics and empirical methodology to make positive, testable statements about law. Go, scientific legal research!

Autostereogram

2007-09-12T07:48:00.000+01:00

Understanding the maths and statistics in cognate papers to law is just like looking at an autostereogram. We could either take other people's words for what it shows, or we could try to see it on our own. When we've finally got the right technique, the beauty within will be revealed.

Lord Kelvin's Dictum

2007-09-07T11:09:00.000+01:00

I found an interesting quote by Lord Kelvin today: "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."

Greg Mankiw on the Sociology of Economics

2007-09-06T10:19:00.000+01:00

About a month ago, Greg Mankiw blogged about the Sociology of Economics. He asked the question of why economists are so aggressive when discussing issues. The suggested reasons from Mankiw and other commentators were varied; ranging from higher IQ to rigorous graduate training in maths and statistics to personality type. The reason I favoured most is that economists have greater confidence in their knowledge and analyses compared to other social scientists.

Apparently, the same or even more intensive character trait is found in mathematicians. According to this blog post, fierce arguments are bound to flare up in maths confernce. This is perhaps because truth in mathematics in binary. Either a conjecture is true or is false. There are no various shades of grey.

So does this mean that intellectual aggressiveness is correlated to how robust knowledge in one's field is?

P.S. In case you're curious, I am an INTJ.

Maths in Political Science and Sociology

2007-08-30T14:16:00.000+01:00

Early this month at the orgtheory.net blog, there was a discussion on how maths "invaded" political science but not sociology. The first entry is here, and the sequel is here. Towards the very end of the sequel, someone put forward a hypothesis that political science is math-heavy today because of the attack of "math geeks" from economics departments. I particularly like this hypothesis, being sort of a math geek myself. So, would there be an attack of math geeks upon law schools? Highly unlikely, I reckon. :-(

Doctoral Programme

2007-08-30T13:26:00.000+01:00

This is the time when new LL.M. students arrive for the new academic year. Some of them will aspire to go on to completing a Ph.D. degree before returning home. Many of them are from the Far East and the Asian continent, and most of them are very young, being recent graduates of a law degree.

I have no quilms of people doing an LL.M. degree. What I find hard to understand is the thinking that an LL.M. degree provides all the necessary training for doctoral research. I find this thinking to be peculiar if not outright wrong. To me, an LL.M. degree is just another four more course modules that a student take. They are meant to convey more legal knowledge, not legal research skills. In fact, I would say that an LL.M. gives no new research skills than whatever that have been acquired during the undergraduate years. Unfortunately, for most law students, not much substantive (read: scientific) research skills have in fact been acquired. Law students are traditionally trained as advocates of law. As an advocate, all they need is to find out what the correct law is, identifying conflicts in legal principles, and arguing a reasonable case on the clients' behalf. Undergraduate law students are not taught how to evaluate law and legal policies scientifically.

This means, that an LL.M. should be considered as a terminal degree, insufficient to provide the necessary training to go on to doctoral research. I believe that there is no point in a doctoral thesis if it consists only of identifying the relevant laws, recognising conflicts in legal principles, and is loaded with legal rhetorics. We do not need a Ph.D. to show that we know how to do this. An LL.B. would suffice. Fortunately, most of the Ph.D. proposals I have read are not attempting to do these three things. Instead they try to ask policy-oriented questions, but unfortunately without having the proper toolset to answer them.

My conviction is that the only way forward in terms of doctoral training in law or legal research is to design doctoral programmes which admit students straight from their undergraduate degrees. These doctoral students will then have to pass extensive research-oriented courses before commencing on their research. If they do not show sufficient ability to complete a research, they will at most be awared a Master's of Research degree. One possibility of going about this is to offer a doctoral programme which consists of a one-year MRes degree and a subsequent three years' research. In order to make it attractive to foreign students, applicants can apply to be admitted as a one-year MRes student or as a four-year doctoral student. This will look like the American way of doctoral research in other social science, where a Master's degree is not a prerequisite to commencing graduate studies.

An LL.M is not the training ground for legal research skills. Doctoral programmes are.

Political Science

2007-08-21T11:17:00.000+01:00

Since coming back from the ECPR summer school, I am learning more about methodological training in political science. Today, from the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, I came to know of the existence of the Society for Political Methodology and its informative biannually Political Methodologist newsletter. It would be nice if we could have our equivalent Society for Legal Science Methodology.

The Methodology of Legal Science

2007-08-19T11:44:00.001+01:00

Various groups use the term 'legal science' to mean different things. In the continental civil law system, legal science means the study and proper classification of law. But I mean something different here. I use 'science' in the modern sense of the term. Science is about the study and discovery of universal characteristics of physical and social phenomena.

In the same stance, legal science, to me, is about the study and discovery of universal characteristics of legal institutions and legal phenomena. Although legal science is related to "law in action" as opposed to purely legal doctrinal research (law in the books), it differs to some extent from "law and society" in that it is not about observation for observation sake, although there is still much merit in such endeavour. Instead, legal science research aims to go further and discover universal statements (theories) about legal institutions and legal phenomena. Hence, hypothesis testing is part and parcel of the legal science methodology.

What are the methodological techniques in legal science? The usual tools in science are mathematics, inferential statistics, and experiments. And to test hypothesis, we collect data. In economics, these methodological tools, except for the data collection part, have their own name: mathematical economics, econometrics and experimental economics. Hence by analogy, in legal science we call them mathematical jurisprudence, jurimetrics, and experimental jurisprudence, respectively.

The use of these three terms are not of my own invention. Mathematical jurisprudence, jurimetrics and experimental jurisprudence are actual terms used by earlier scholars, particularly those in the no-defunct American legal realist movement. I shall say something about the relationship between American legal realism and law and economics scholars in the future. (See Duxbury 1995.) For now, I would consider that the American legal realist have redeemed their reputation, given that with a more sophisticated methodology, the law and economics movement has basically started to achieve what the legal realists set out but failed to achieve.

* Duxbury, Neil. 1995. Patterns of American Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A Nobel Prize in Legal Science

2007-08-10T15:35:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, Tom Ulen wrote an excellent paper questioning whether there should be "A Nobel Prize in Legal Science". A copy of his paper is still available here. What is surprising is that so far, no one has actually carried forward a plan for such a prize, or at least none that I know of. It would be a grave mistake if the first generation of scholars who gave us scientific laws on legal phenomena (think Coase) are not given this recognition before it was too late. Surely we don't want to repeat the same thing as what happened to Keynes.

We do not really need to commit such a prize under the aegis of the Nobel Committee. Indeed, other disciplinary areas have awarded their own prizes with prestige not inferior to the Nobel Prize. For example, in the field of mathematics, the Fields Medal is awarded every four years to a notable mathematician under the age of 40. Similarly in economics, there is the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association.

Perhaps, what needs to be done is to find a sponsor who will fund an endowment. We can call the prize anything we want. It could be named after the principal sponsor, or after one of the earlier advocates of legal science. If I have my vote, it would Oliver Wendell Holmes, for famously and accurately prophetized that "[f]or the rational study of the law the black letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics."

A Nobel Prize in legal science might just be what we need to put legal science scholarship at par with other areas of social science.

ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques

2007-08-08T14:22:00.001+01:00

I've just come back from the ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques in Ljubljana. Thanks to Rebecca Morton for a note in the ELS Blog. Attending the summer school, which is principally meant for political science researchers, gave me many thoughts on research training in law.

Generally, there is not much of a research method to talk of in the context of legal research. Legal scholars in the English common law tradition pretty much see law research as equivalent to literature work, either by perusing the library in the olden days or searching the many expensive online databases nowadays.

There is very little thought being given to how "legal research" can be improved, particularly along a more scientific route. Perhaps, we are still very much tied to the idea of a law school being a trade school, with the sole goal of training solicitors and barristers. And hence, the consequence being that all that a law researcher needs to know is how to to find out what the law is and how to interpret statutes and cases.

But surely this is not what law school is just all about. If the number of students doing and applying to do a Ph.D. in law is of any indication, law schools and law researchers should also be interested in discovering sound legal policies in their respective areas of interest. And once we enter into the realm of policy discussions, we should be concerned with our methods of policy assessment.

One thing I have learned in the ECPR summer school is that researchers from other branches of social sciences are concerned about their methodologies. Now that interdisciplinary legal research seems to be in vogue, with the borrowing of ideas from economics, sociology and political science, perhaps it is about time for us law researchers to think of systematising proper and sound methodological techniques to the study of law and legal phenoma. Maybe there are already something out there, but so far, I have yet to discover it. If there's none yet, I'm all in for a Summer School of Legal Methods and Techniques with a heavy dose of empirical and statistical tools.