Empirical Legal Research: a state of knowledge across Europe International Conference at the University of Toulouse (9+10 June 2023)

Toulouse University will soon host a two day conference on empirical legal studies with a particular focus on environmental law. It will bring together scholars from across Europe, including ELS pioneers such as Arthur Dyevre and Mathias Siems. Of twenty speakers overall, two currently work in German academia: Moritz Reese (presenting on "Lessons learned from an implementation study about the water directive") and Konstantin Chatziathanasiou (presenting on "Empirical constitutional law scholarship across Europe"). Here's from the conference website: Empirical legal research is defined as the systematic collection and...

Scopus/Scimago: Useless for Studying Legal Research! An Empirical Assessment of Misclassification Rates in a Popular Scientometric Data Source

Empirical research on citation patterns and scholarly reputation in academic research ("scientometrics") frequently relies on a commercial database called Scopus. Scientometric studies routinely analyse the contents of this database as representing the universe of research articles in various academic fields, including legal research. We reviewed the publically available data on German law journals and found that hardly ten percent of them are classified correctly. Even our most charitable count puts the misclassification rate at around 60 percent. In scientometrically studies regarding legal research, the use of Scopus...

Brennstoff für die Rechtsempirie Veranstaltungen am "FUELS" Berlin

Am Fachbereich Rechtswissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin blickt das "Empirical Legal Studies Center" inzwischen auf eine Reihe hochkarätiger Vortrags- und Diskussionsveranstaltungen zurück. Damit verfolgt es den schon im Akronym FUELS mitschwingenden Anspruch, die empirische Rechtsforschung in Deutschland zu befeuern - und international zu vernetzen. Seit dem 3. Dezember 2019 wurden 23 "Past Events" auf der FUELS-Website dokumentiert, darunter auch die vom FUELS ausgerichtete 18. Jahrestagung der German Law and Economics Association (GLEA), sowie Gastvorträge von deutschen Rechtswissenschaftler:innen im Ausland (bspw. Holger Spamann, Julian Nyarko und Jens...

Court Decisions: 99 % Uncharted Deep Sea? Mapping the Blind Spot of Digital Legal Studies over Half a Century (1971-2019)

Legal research increasingly turns to systematic analyses of large amounts of legal text. Current research programs such as Big Data Legal Scholarship, Evidence-Based Jurisprudence, Law & Corpus Linguistics, Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics, and Law as Data all rely (one way or another) on digitizing or collecting, collectively analysing and quantifying features of text corpora from various genres. First and foremost among these genres are court decisions, due to both their normative force (either stare decisis, or de facto) and their easy and legally unconstrained useability: Court decisions are in the public domain pretty much...

Die Kodifikationsidee im Computermodell Maschinelles Lernen und Topic Modelling als rechtspolitische Orientierungshilfe?

Wie entdeckt man die Leitideen eines neu zu kodifizierenden Rechtsgebiets? Indem man zunächst diejenigen Gesetze ausmacht, die von ähnlichen Themen handeln und sodann ihre normativen Regelungsprogramme vergleicht. Beim ersten Schritt, so behaupten nun der R|E-Autor Tobias Gumpp und sein Mitstreiter Marc Pierre Schneider, können uns computergestütze Methoden helfen. Für eine empirische Studie in der neuen "Zeitschrift für Digitalisierung und Recht" (ZfDR) wendeten Gumpp und Schneider einen Algorithmus des maschinellen Lernens auf alle deutschen Bundesgesetze an. Die Studie ist vorbildlich dokumentiert, Daten und Quellcode öffentlich...

Berkeley 12 – 0 Stanford International Pedigrees of Private Law Professors in Germany

The European Football Championship of 2021 is afoot. Many people flock to watch the games - especially today, as the German team competes against Hungary, just hours after German chancellor Merkel publically decried a discriminatory Hungarian law. On days like these, it is hard to know whether politics or football take center-stage. But there's yet another fascinating game that I happened to observe recently: In a paper that got published a few days ago in the German law journal Archiv für die civilistische Praxis ("Archive of Civil Law Studies"), I studied the world of German professors of private law and undertook "An Empirical Inquiry into their...