Empirical Skills Workshop – Quantitative Tools
Etablissement : Faculté de Droit – Lille et Issy-les-Moulineaux
Langue : Anglais
Formation(s) dans laquelle/lesquelles le cours apparait :
Période : S1
The course is specifically designed for lawyers and law students with no empirical research experience.
no experience of empirical research. No particular statistical or mathematical
mathematical knowledge is required. The R programming language is introduced
in simple, intuitive terms.
The course aims to introduce participants to empirical legal methods:
– Typology of methods: experimental (laboratory, field, vignettes, games),
observational studies, automatic natural language processing, network analysis,
descriptive statistics.
– Data collection, extraction and preparation.
– Data collection tools: Qualtrics, Google Forms, Classex, web scraping
– Data typology, notion of variable (discrete, continuous, categorial…).
– Statistical techniques: regression analysis, notion of statistical significance
– Introduction to the R statistical programming language
– Causal analysis: omission bias, reverse causality, causal identification strategy.
Module 1. Overview of empirical legal methods, exercises on Qualtrics and Classex
We will review various techniques used in empirical legal research.
Participants will then be invited to complete a questionnaire and a number of decision-making exercises.
exercises. Depending on the progress of the session, the instructor will ‘eventually lead
an interactive game simulating a « judges’ dialogue ».
Module 2. Network analysis and introduction to the programming language R
Network analysis allows you to model and analyze the links between different entities
various entities: quotations, individuals, organizations… In the legal field, we
In the legal field, we’ll be focusing on case law citations and legal networks.
The exercises will be completed on the Google Colab platform in the R statistical programming language.
statistical programming language R, to which participants will be introduced in a simple and intuitive way.
A gmail address is required for editing the exercises. Participants
who do not have a gmail address are invited to create one.
Module 3. Experimental studies
The randomized trial is the gold standard of causal inference. Experimental methods
are being used more and more in the legal field, notably to evaluate the success of
of programs or reforms. We’ll be looking at different types: vignette experiments,
field experiments…
We introduce the technique of regression analysis and practice the analysis of data from vignette experiments.
of vignette experiments.
