Amy Perfors

This post started off as little more than some amusing wordplay brought on by the truism that "the plural of anecdote is not data". It's a sensible admonition -- you can't just exchange anectodes and feel like that's the equivalent of actual scientific data -- but, like many truisms, it's not necessarily true. After all, the singular of data is anecdote: every individual datapoint in a scientific study constitutes an anecdote (though admittedly probably a quite boring one, depending on the nature of your study). A better truism would therefore be more...

In light of Jim's post below, it is worth pointing out an ongoing conversation at the Northwestern Law Review on ideological change on the Supreme Court. The discussion was prompted by a forthcoming article entitled "Ideological Drift among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, and How Important?", authored by a who's who of empirical court scholars: Lee Epstein, Andrew Martin, Jeffrey Segal, and our own Kevin Quinn. In...

With the ice melting and the birds chirping it’s the time again for planning the summer. Here a few worthwhile reasons not to be stuck behind your desk all summer. Maybe these are not the most exotic events and locations but at least they are ‘productive’ and you won’t feel guilty for being away.

The Michigan Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques runs several sessions over a total of eight weeks from June 4 to July 27. The courses are mainly about designing, writing and testing surveys, and analyzing survey...

Empirical, particularly quantitative empirical, scholarship is all the rage these days in law schools. (By the way, as a quantitative legal empiricist,that makes me really nervous. If there's one constant in legal academia, it's that things go in and out of style as fast in law schools as they do in Milan fashion shows.)

One thing that has been bothering me lately about this next phase, new wave, dance craze aspect of legal scholarship is the use of appellate cases as datapoints. It's tempting to think that one can code appellate decisions or judicial opinions pursuant to some...