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Utrecht'LaWRevieVV Arthur Dyevre and Michal Ovsdek, 'Experimental legal methods
in the classroom' (2020) 16(1) Utrecht Law Review pp. 1-12.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36633/ulr.557
ARTICLE
Experimental legal methods in the classroom
Arthur Dyevre* and Michal Ovedekt
As legal research and scholarship are increasingly turning to interdisciplinary approaches, the
question arises as to how to introduce quantitative research techniques to a student popula-
tion usually unfamiliar with empirical methods. We argue that classroom experiments form an
effective - and, from the perspective of students, attractive - way to teach law students
the logic of empirical inquiry. Many questions and controversies on and around adjudication and
the impact of legal regulations hinge on matters of beliefs and behaviour which experimental
methods are well-suited to investigate. Moreover, experimental legal research is fairly intuitive
and does not require advanced statistical knowledge. Thanks to modern software tools, experi-
ments can be conducted and analysed in the classroom without much prior technical knowledge.
We provide basic guidance on how to undertake in-class experimental legal research and discuss
examples of in-class experiments on gender effects, anchoring effects and neutrality bias.
Keywords: randomized experiments; legal methods; teaching; interdisciplinarity
1. Introduction
The legal academy is increasingly turning to interdisciplinarity.1 While the empirical turn has been more
pronounced in the United States2 and Israel than in Europe, it is affecting both research and teaching.3
Empirical legal studies have the potential to answer questions that are beyond the reach of traditional, doc-
trinal methods. These questions include the effective impact of legal rules on the behaviour of the human
agents whose conduct they purport to regulate; the prediction of judicial outcomes; and the prejudices
and biases of judges and other legal decision makers. In answering these questions, empirical research can
generate insights that are useful to legal practitioners as well as legal reformers. We see the rise of empirical
legal research as a positive development. Yet, as empirical legal research expands and diversifies, lawyers are
increasingly expected, if not to be able to conduct empirical research themselves, at least to become intel-
ligent consumers of empirical scholarship, both of the quantitative and qualitative variety.4 This raises an
educational challenge, for law students are usually unfamiliar with the concepts and techniques required
to conduct and evaluate empirical work. Hence the question: how do we best impart empirical skills to this
student population?
Professor, Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU Leuven. Corresponding author. Email: arthur.dyevre@kuleu-
ven.be. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from European Research Council Grant 638154 (EU-THORITY).
t PhD candidate, Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU Leuven. Email: michal.ovadek@kuleuven.be.
Urska Sadl and Henrik Palmer Olsen, 'Can Quantitative Methods Complement Doctrinal Legal Studies? Using Citation Network and
Corpus Linguistic Analysis to Understand International Courts' (2017) 30 Leiden Journal of International Law 327; Tom Ginsburg
and Thomas J Miles, 'Empiricism and the Rising Incidence of Coauthorship in Law' (2011) University of Illinois Law Review 1785;
Kees van den Bos and Liesbeth Hulst, 'On Experiments in Empirical Legal Research' [2016] Law and Method <https://www.bjuti-
jdschriften.nl/tijdschrift/lawandmethod/2016/03/lawandmethod-D-15-00006> accessed 20 January 2019; Thomas J Miles and
Cass R Sunstein, 'New Legal Realism, The' (2008) 75 University of Chicago Law Review 831; Peter Cane and Herbert Kritzer (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research (Oxford University Press 2010); Andras Jakab, Arthur Dyevre and Giulio Itzcovich
(eds), Comparative Constitutional Reasoning (Cambridge University Press 2017).
2 See Tracey E George, 'An Empirical Study of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools' (2006) 81 Indiana Law Journal 141.
3 Largely as a result of American influence on Israeli law schools, see Pnina Lahav, 'American Moment [s]: When, How, and Why Did
Israeli Law Faculties Come to Resemble Elite US Law Schools?' (2009) 10 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 653.
4 Christoph Engel, 'Legal Experiments: Mission Impossible?' (2013) Erasmus Law Lectures. One of the most cited impactful and most
cited books ever penned by legal scholar leans extensively on experimental research, see Richard H Taler and Cass R Sunstein,
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin 2009).
Utrecht Law Review, 2020, Volume 16(1)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/utrecht16&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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