Empirical Methods for the Law

Christoph Engel

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 2018, vol. 174, issue 1, 5-23

Abstract: Normative legal argument based on empirical evidence is not necessarily best served by standards from the social sciences. Precautionary concern for false negatives may call for an adjustment of the significance level. That all legal choice is historically contingent, that legal problems tend to be ill-defined, and that strategic actors have an incentive to bias the generation of evidence create further challenges. Yet the law can capitalize on the adversarial principle. Competition among interested parties helps contain the strategic element and spurs the creative search for better evidence. This leads to suggestive, but institutionally contained, empirical evidence.

Keywords: normative claims; frequentist statistics; significance; power; structural-equation model; finite mixture; Bayesian statistics; prediction; machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 C01 C11 C12 C18 C81 H41 K00 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Empirical Methods for the Law (2017)
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DOI: 10.1628/093245617X15096094637968

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