The second session will try to provide you with basic background on the empirical research methods. I believe this is an important topic as all of you shall at least partly consider application of these methods in your PhD projects. At the same time lawyers are usually not very strong in using empirics or even misunderstand their ontological foundations...

The session shall start on 16 April from 10.30 AM on dedicated team in MS Teams.

Required and recommended reading

Despite its lenght, I would like you all to read (link leads to the text):

Epstein, L., King, G. Rules of Inference. University of Chicago Law Review, 2002, vol. 69, no. 1.

For those more interested:

Cane, P., Kritzer H. (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research. Oxford: OUP, 2012. 

• Only the following chapters: Quantitative Approaches to Empirical Legal Research + Qualitative Approaches to Empirical Legal Research (both from p. 1031 to 1086).

Written assignment (deadline is set to 11 April)

Prepare a written memo that would answer to following questions:

• Find and pick any journal article related to your field of interest that uses empirical methods. Explain why the authors need to apply empirical methods. Was there any other way how to proceed? Is his/her approach persuasive, logical, understandable to you (sample selection, collection of data, analysis, presentation of results etc.)? Do you find the article and its conclusions useful in real life? Be critical as much as possible. (1-2 pages)
• If you are unable to find any empirical article close to your interest (which is hard to phantom to be honest), you may use the one provided below.

• Think again about your PhD research project and potential use of empirical methods in it (so even if you do not wish to use them in practice, imagine how would that be possible). How you may utilize these methods? What data would be interesting to collect, how would you collect them and to what use? What type of analysis you might apply (qualitative, quantitative)? Try to present a short example of such data collection and analysis (so that your thinking is not only abstract but concretely implemented). (1-2 pages)

Please submit your assignments through the "odevzdávarna" below by 11 April.