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NEWS | Friday, April 25, 2008
Faculty Presentation
Professor Andrew Martin, director of the law school’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL), discussed the launching of the new center in 2006 and several of CERL’s major projects. The center is supporting cutting edge empirical research and technological support for projects such as the Martin-Quinn Scores, which measure the relative location of Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum; the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, directed by Professor Schlanger, which offers an on-line, searchable database of numerous civil rights cases and court documents; Supreme Court Forecasting, a study of how legal experts and political scientists assess and predict Supreme Court decision-making; Equal Opportunity Employment Commission Litigation Analysis, a study of EEOC court records; Federal District Court Database, an on-line index of civil cases by category, year, and district court; and U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database, a repository of the official records of the court from 1789 to the present. This last project is being conducted in conjunction with Michigan State, Northwestern, Princeton, Stony Brook, and the University of Pennsylvania. Both the Martin-Quinn Scores and EEOC projects are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). CERL also has applied for an NFS grant to support an international empirical study of constitutional courts.
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CONGRATULATIONS | Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Doctoral Dissertation Success
CERL GSA, Ryan Owens, successfully defends his doctoral dissertation completing all requirements for his PhD. Congratulations Ryan.
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NEWS | Monday, April 14, 2008
Andrew Martin honored at the ninth Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards
Andrew Martin has been selected by the Graduate Student Senate to receive recognition for excellence in mentoring as part of their ninth annual Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards. The award, which will be presented by the Graduate Student Senate and the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, will be presented at a special reception to be held in honor of Andrew Martin on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 4:30 p.m. in the Women's Building Formal Lounge.
Graduate students in the Senate created this award to honor faculty members whose commitment to graduate students and excellence in graduate training has made a significant contribution to the outstanding success of graduate students in the Arts and Sciences school at Washington University.
The Mentoring Committee of the Graduate Student Senate recognized Martin for excellence in mentoring, for his dedication to providing graduate students with the skills and resources they need to succeed as scholars and for the sincere and active interest he has shown in the well being of all his students.
The event is co-sponsored by the Graduate Student Senate and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
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NEWS | Monday, April 14, 2008
CERL Researchers Receive National Science Foundation Grant
A team of researchers at the Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) have received a research grant from the Law and Social Science program at the National Science Foundation to support a project titled "A Cross-National Study of Judicial Institutionalization and Independence." Professor Andrew Martin and Professor Matt Gabel (Political Science) are the principal investigators, along with scholars at Emory University and the University of Rochester. The project aims to understand why some courts exert influence over policy outcomes while others do not, and the extent to which institutional design affects judicial influence. During this two-year pilot study the research team will collect and code decisions made by constitutional courts in 60 countries for a single calendar year.
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NEWS | Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Andrew Martin, Lee Epstein & Christy Boyd to receive Pi Sigma Alpha award
Andrew Martin, Lee Epstein & Christy Boyd (CERL Graduate Student Associate and Political Science PhD student) are to receive the Pi Sigma Alpha award for the "Best paper presented at the 2007 Midwest Political Science Association meeting" at the bi-annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association on Friday, April 4. Their acclaimed paper, which was selected from over 3,000 papers presented, is entitled "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging". The law school contributed substantially to the success this paper through financial support and via feedback from many colleagues who read drafts and participated in a faculty workshop.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Political Science and Law Expert to Join Faculty
David Law of the University of San Diego School of Law and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, will be joining the Washington University Law faculty this summer as a professor of law, with an additional appointment in the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences. His teaching and scholarship focus on law and political science, comparative public law, and constitutional theory.
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CONGRATULATIONS | Tuesday, December 11, 2007
CERL Graduate Student Associate headed to Harvard
CERL Graduate Student Associate and Political Science graduate student Ryan Owens recently accepted a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. A student of American politics, Ryan's research focuses on the politics of judicial decision making. His dissertation examines whether Justices respond strategically to constraints emanating from the separation of powers built into the Constitution. More specifically, he coupled spatial models and quantitative analyses to generate and test predictions about the circumstances under which Supreme Court Justices would rationally anticipate likely Congressional responses to Court decisions and thus vote strategically at the certiorari stage. He worked under the direction of Professors James Spriggs, Andrew Martin, and Steve Smith.
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NEWS | Friday, November 30, 2007
Bagenstos, CERL Collaborate on Amicus Brief
Collaborating with political scientists from Washington University Law’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL), law professor Samuel Bagenstos has filed an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court that argues, using social science research, that an Indiana voter identification law is unconstitutional.
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NEWS | Friday, November 30, 2007
CERL Faculty, Graduate Students Present Research
Several faculty members and graduate students with the law school’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) are giving presentations at the second annual “Conference on Empirical Legal Studies” at New York University School of Law, on Novebmer 9-10. The conference is designed to feature original empirical and experimental legal scholarship by leading scholars worldwide, from a diverse range of fields.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Thursday, October 25, 2007
C++ Programmer sought
This project consists of updating the existing code to the updated version of the Scythe Statistical Library, version 1.0.2, and optimizing the existing C++ code.
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NEWS | Friday, October 19, 2007
Andrew Martin interviewed on SCOTUS Blog.
"Andrew has done some very influential work on the Supreme Court, including co-authoring a paper on ideological drift of Supreme Court Justices ..."
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Clearinghouse Initiative seeks a Project Director
Margo Schlanger, creator of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, seeks a Project Director to oversee the substantive affairs of this special collection.
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WEB | Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Age of the Empirical
... the social world must be broken down into numbers that can be calculated, and to deal with matters of any social complexity, that means a lot of numbers. To draw any conclusions, these numbers must then be sliced and diced to test hypotheses about particular social claims ...
Excerpt from a John O. McGinnis article published in the June/July 2006 edition of Policy Review.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Monday, September 3, 2007
Martin & Quinn research featured in UK Financial Times
A recent news article in the UK Financial Times newspaper, entitled “Man vs. machine - How computers routed the experts” by Ian Ayres, featured the research of professors Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn. The article describes how by using just a few variables concerning the politics of a case, it is possible to predict how US Supreme Court justices would vote. A detailed demonstration is citied in the article showing how their flow charts, outperformed the opinions of 83 legal experts – esteemed law professors, practitioners and pundits predicting 75 per cent of the court’s affirm/reverse results correctly, while the legal experts collectively got only 59.1 per cent right. View the article.
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NEWS | Monday, August 27, 2007
NSF Grant to Support Empirical Research
A two-year grant was awarded to Professors Pauline T. Kim, Andrew D. Martin, and Margo Schlanger for their project titled, "The Litigation Process in Government-Initiated Employment Discrimination Suits." The research is a project of the law school’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) in collaboration with the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Thursday, August 16, 2007
CERL begins search for an Assistant Web Developer
CERL seeks to hire a capable and energetic web developer to contribute to the growing body of Center-built research initiatives. If you are such a person or know of one, we'd love to chat.
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NEWS | Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Professor Martin's research on judicial drift discussed in the July ABA Journal.
"... a new round of scholarship has revised the thinking and re-energized the debate. It comes against the backdrop of two recent events: the 2004 release of Blackmun’s private papers and the sudden replacement of two justices—including the chief justice—on a court that has sat undisturbed for 11 years, the longest stretch for a nine-member court in its history."
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Monday, July 23, 2007
CERL names 2007-2008 Fellow
Delia Bailey, a recent Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology joined CERL as a post-doctoral fellow on July 1. Dr. Bailey is an expert in American elections and political methodology. She will be working on a project focused on the election of judges and prosecutors.
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NEWS | Monday, April 23, 2007
Martin article discussed by Washington Post
In his article Justices Are of an Opinion, but Not Often, Robert Barnes discusses Martin's most recent effort regarding judicial drift, a paper done in collaboration with Lee Epstein (Northwestern), Kevin M. Quinn (Harvard) and Jeffrey Segal (State University of New York at Stony Brook).
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NEWS | Thursday, April 5, 2007
Martin's Research Featured on Northwestern Colloquoy
Professor Andrew Martin's research on judicial drift (in collaboration with Lee Epstein, Northwestern, Kevin Quinn, Harvard, and Jeffrey Segal, SUNY Stony Brook) has been featured on the Northwestern University Law Review online Colloquy (site). Those commenting on the research include Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, Professor Stephen Burbank (Penn Law School), and Professor Ward Farnsworth (Boston University School of Law).
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CONGRATULATIONS | Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Kim Awarded Research Professorship
Professor Pauline Kim has been awarded the School of Law’s first Dean’s Distinguished Research Professorship in recognition of her outstanding scholarship. The fellowship provides for a research leave during the spring 2008 semester.
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EVENT | Monday, March 19, 2007
Enrollment Begins for the Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop
The Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop is for law school and social science faculty interested in learning about empirical research. Leading empirical scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin will teach the workshop, which provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data. Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop. Topics to be covered include research design, sampling, measurement, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and linear regression.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Tuesday, January 23, 2007
CERL begins search for 2007-2008 Post-Doctoral Fellow
The Center for Empirical Research in the Law at the Washington University School of Law ( site ) is offering a one-year postdoctoral fellowship for scholars with Ph.D.s in political science, economics, psychology, sociology, statistics, or other social sciences with interests in empirical legal scholarship.
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WEB | Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Martin-Quinn Scores website released
CERL is pleased to announce the release of the Martin-Quinn scores website. This site contains measures, developed by Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn (Harvard University, Department of Government), of the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum. The scores are freely available for download on the site.
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NEWS | Tuesday, December 5, 2006
St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial applauds Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse for preserving legal documents with "great historical and cultural value."
"The value of the clearinghouse can be seen through just one example. Brown v. Board of Education is the nation's most famous and seminal civil rights case, yet not all of the documents pertaining to the case have been easy to come by, Ms. Schlanger said. The 1954 Supreme Court decision that 'separate is inherently unequal,' and the 1955 decision announcing that remediation of Jim Crow school segregation should proceed 'with all deliberate speed,' have been readily available. But until the clearinghouse was created, other crucial documents — from the filing of the first complaint in Topeka in 1951 through final dismissal of the case in 1999 — were much more difficult to locate."
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EVENT | Monday, November 20, 2006
Enrollment Begins for the Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Advanced Course
The Advanced Course is a workshop for law school faculty interested in furthering their training in empirical research. It is designed for those who have some experience with empirical legal research and an understanding of elementary statistics (at the level taught in the introductory workshop). Topics to be covered will include: multiple regression, regression models for limited dependent variables, presenting results from non-linear models, data visualization and graphics, and matching methods for causal inference.
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NEWS | Tuesday, November 14, 2006
CERL GSA Boyd's work featured on ELS Blog
The ELS blog highlighted GSA Christina Boyd's work on the Adminstrative Office's Terminations Database, an over seven million observation database of civil terminations in federal district courts from 1970-2005. According to blog-author, using the dataset for judge-specific analysis "has been extremely difficult previously, and had to be done one case at a time." It was said that Boyd used a "vastly better method," and has "put together directions for quickly merging the AO data on thousands of cases with the name of the case and the judge's name, available on her webpage."
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NEWS | Thursday, November 2, 2006
The Record discusses the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
"The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse marks the fruition of an exciting collaboration," said Kent D. Syverud, J.D., dean and the Ethan A.H. Shepley University Professor at the School of Law.
"It uses cutting-edge Internet database methods in what is truly a multidisciplinary project. Its development has involved faculty, students and technicians in both the law school and Arts & Sciences, and it will benefit researchers, teachers, students and participants in many policy areas and academic disciplines."
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NEWS | Monday, October 23, 2006
SCOTUS Blog features research by Black and Boyd
A recent paper ( pdf ) on the U.S. Supreme Court's agenda setting process by Ryan Black and Christina Boyd, graduate student associates in CERL, is the subject of a two-part "Ask the Author" feature ( Part 1,
Part 2 )
at the Supreme Court of the United States Blog ( SCOTUS Blog ).
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NEWS | Sunday, October 1, 2006
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is covered in sideBar
The launch of Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is covered in sideBar, the Washington University School of Law Alumni Newsletter. "CERL ... oversaw the six-month process of bringing this large data collection online. This involved analyzing the full body of materials, developing an appropriate database schematic, importing enourmous quantities of legacy data, building a Web-centric application to allow for continued data collection and coding, and finally creating and launching the public website."
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CONGRATULATIONS | Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Martin's Article Selected as "Seminal Paper" by Oxford University Press
Andrew D. Martin's article, co-authored with Kevin M. Quinn (Harvard University, Department of Government), titled "Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the US. Supreme Court, 1953-1999," was selected by the Oxford University Press as one of 100 seminal papers published in its first 100 years of journal publishing. The article, published in Political Analysis, develops a dynamic item response theory model that can be used to estimate the policy preferences of Supreme Court justices.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse website debuts
The Center for Empirical Research in the Law debuts their first major sponsored project, the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Assisting Margo Schlanger, the mind behind the clearinghouse, CERL worked to create a data collection and dissemination system to facilitate the coding of upwards of ten thousand legal documents into a searchable record of civil rights cases in America.
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ANNOUNCEMENT | Saturday, July 1, 2006
New Law Research Center Established
The Washington University School of Law announced the creation of a new Center for Empirical Research in the Law. The center has been established to enhance empirical legal scholarship at the Washington University School of Law, as well as throughout the University and the legal academy. The center will also provide support and training on empirical legal research to students and colleagues.
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