George Mason Ties for First Place Among Top Law Schools in Study on Empirical Legal Scholarship
In a new study on legal scholarship, George Mason University School of Law ties for first place, along with University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, in the area of empirical legal research. The study, entitled "An Empirical Study of Empirical Legal Scholarship:
The Top Law Schools," was written by Vanderbilt University law professor Tracey E. George and will be published in the “The Next Generation of Law School Rankings” Symposium,
Indiana Law Journal (2005). The paper is currently available from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
In her study, Professor George states that "Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the next big thing in legal intellectual thought.
Empirical legal scholarship (“ELS”), as the term is generally used in law schools, refers to a
specific type of empirical research: a model-based approach coupled with a quantitative method.
The empirical legal scholar offers a positive theory of a law or legal institution and then tests that
theory using quantitative techniques developed in the social sciences. The evidence may be produced by controlled experiment or collected systematically from real world observation. In
either event, quantitative or statistical analysis is a central component of the project."
Professor George restricts her study to the top forty-one law schools in the April 2004
rankings by U.S. News & World Report. She uses a variety of measures to compile a ranking of these schools including the number of law faculty with social science doctorates; the number of law faculty with secondary
appointments in social science departments; and the number of articles in journals that publish empirical
legal scholarship.
Below is a table that lists the top ten law schools in the "Overall Ranking of All Law Schools in Study."
| ELS Ranking |
Law School |
| 1-tie |
University of California, Berkeley |
| 1-tie |
George Mason University |
| 1-tie |
Northwestern University |
| 4-tie |
University of Pennsylvania |
| 4-tie |
University of Southern California |
| 6 |
Cornell |
| 7-tie |
University of Chicago |
| 7-tie |
Stanford University |
| 9-tie |
University of Michigan |
| 9-tie |
Yale University |
Empirical scholarship will be the theme of the upcoming annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) to be held in New Orleans, January 4-8, 2006. For more information on this topic, see Empirical Scholarship: What Should We Study and How Should We Study It?
.
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