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41 San Diego L. Rev. 1741 (2004)
Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship

handle is hein.journals/sanlr41 and id is 1753 raw text is: Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship? THEODORE EISENBERG* People conduct legal scholarship for many different reasons. This Article focuses on the demand for and reaction to scholarship that helps inform litigants, policymakers, and society as a whole about how the legal system works. Law schools do little to train generations of lawyers in how to systematically assess the state of the legal system and the legal system's performance. Schools leave such assessments largely to self- interested advocates and to other disciplines. Self-interested advocates have less interest in objective assessment of the system than in pushing preferred policy agendas. Academic disciplines other than law have a distinct advantage in that some of them have trained many of their members in the methodologies needed to assess law-related programs. But nonlawyers have the distinct disadvantage of often not understanding legal doctrine or the state of the law. This sometimes leads to blunders that compromise empirical analyses. The need for legally sophisticated empirical analysts is clear. I. EVIDENCE OF GROWTH IN EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES It is not that we lack calls for law-trained experts to do more empirical legal scholarship. Scholars have long commented on the relative paucity of empirical work by law professors.' But any establishment moves * Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law, Cornell University. 1. See generally Robert C. Ellickson, The Case for Coase and Against Coaseanism , 99 YALE L.J. 611 (1989); Michael Heise, The Importance of Being Empirical, 26 PEPP. L. REV. 807 (1999); Richard K. Neumann, Jr. & Stefan H. Krieger, Empirical Inquiry Twenty-Five Years After The Lawyering Process, 10 CLINICAL L. REV. 349 (2003); Peter H. Schuck, Why Don't Law Professors Do More Empirical Research?, 39 J. LEGAL EDUC. 323 (1989); Elizabeth Warren, The Market for Data: The Changing 1741