Empirical methods are increasingly used in legal practice, legal scholarship, and by policy-makers. This one-credit course is designed to help students understand, perform, and critique empirical legal scholarship. The course covers a broad range of topics, including descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, regression, and regression with dummy and interaction independent variables. Lectures, readings, and exercises focus on:
When to apply particular methods
How to apply methods using data and statistical software (i.e., Stata)
How to interpret and report empirical results
How to evaluate and critique results
Students are expected to attend and participate in lectures. In lieu of a final examination, students will complete four homework assignments, each with four to six pages of applied statistical exercises. NO prior knowledge of statistics or statistical software training is necessary. You will be able to complete the exercises based solely on what you learned in class.
This course will end on March 13, 2013.
