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39 J. Legal Educ. 323 (1989)
Why Don't Law Professors Do More Empirical Research

handle is hein.journals/jled39 and id is 335 raw text is: Why Don't Law Professors Do More Empirical Research? Peter H. Schuck Law is preeminently a practical profession. Law teaching seeks to prepare students for the world of practical affairs. Legal scholarship is supposed to clarify truths about that world even though (indeed precisely because) such truths are often elusive and contingent. Yet empirical research-the uncovering of facts about how individuals and institutions within our legal culture actually behave-is a decidedly marginal activity in the legal academy today. Quantitatively, at least, it comprises a trivial proportion of the work that most law professors do. That is my premise. In this brief essay, I cite little hard evidence to support it. I rely instead upon my casual review of the law journals and books that cross my desk day after day, and my (admittedly fragmentary) knowledge of the projects in which legal scholars are generally engaged. Paradoxically, my use of this casual, unsystematic methodology tends to validate my premise in two ways. First, I reify my own critique, thereby exemplifying the very avoidance of empiricism that I lament. Second, my unwillingness to discuss the question except on an impressionistic basis also serves to underscore a remarkable and revealing situation: to my knowl- edge, no law professor has ever empirically investigated the extent to which legal scholars actually conduct empirical research. My thesis is straightforward: The neglect of empirical work is a bad, increasingly worrisome thing for our scholarship and teaching, and the reasons for its persistence are so deeply embedded in the incentive structure and professional norms of the law schools that they are exceed- ingly resistant to change. Before developing (if not proving) this thesis, I must offer some definitions and distinctions. When I speak of empirical research, I refer primarily to statistical studies, i.e., those that involve the application of statistical techniques of inference to large bodies of data in an effort to detect important regularities (or irregularities) that have not previously been identified or verified. I hasten to acknowledge that this definition is arbitrary. Properly understood, of course, empirical research embraces much more than statistical studies. Case studies and legal history, for example, are important genres of empirical research that not only can yield Peter H. Schuck is Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law, Yale Law School. This essay is based on remarks delivered at the annual Legal Scholarship Luncheon at Georgetown University Law Center, March 25, 1988. Bruce Ackerman, Clark Byse, Robert Ellickson, Judith Resnik, Michael Saks, Roy Schotland, and Stanton Wheeler provided useful comments on earlier versions. James Wooten, Yale Law School class of 1989, provided research assistance.

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