Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research opens with a preface where the author notes his background in the area, situating the book as the work of a highly experienced empirical legal research (ELR) researcher. A brief overview of ELR follows in the first chapter, defining terms and placing ELR in context.
The second chapter provides a wide-ranging discussion of the history of ELR from pre-WWII to the present. The chapter presents the origins of many ELR journals and organizations that are still around today and may be familiar to researchers, such as the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Law & Society Review, Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the Federal Judicial Center, and National Center for State Courts. The ease of conducting ELR has greatly expanded since the advent of personal computers, but it is not a new phenomenon. For instance, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) has been around since 1968. Interest in understanding such important topics as criminal justice outcomes and court efficiencies has been longstanding, technological advancements have just made these subjects easier to study.
The next section focuses on methodology, discussing both qualitative and quantitative ELR methods. Illustrative examples from the author's experience and other studies provide useful framing to help the reader understand the methods in practice. The discussions of potential pitfalls are particularly enlightening. For example, in observational studies, how does the presence of the researcher as a participating observer, nonparticipating observer, or something in between, impact the subjects being studied? This can be particularly important to remember when studying behaviors some may label undesirable. The examples prove especially important in the data analysis section as a means of allowing someone without a deep background in statistics or coding to grasp the meaning and use of different methods. As the author prefaces, the reader will not have all the tools necessary to conduct their own ELR analysis after reading this work, but they will be better able to understand ELR analysis conducted by others. This section also provides background to help the reader consider which ELR methods to further investigate in other texts to conduct their own analysis based on what patterns they are attempting to observe through ELR.
The following section on substantive examples seeks to provide a sweeping overview of the current landscape of existing ELR studies. Because the literature is so vast, discussions of individual topics are necessarily brief. This is helpful in allowing the reader to quickly determine what they can expect to find if they look into the literature on a particular topic more in depth themselves, but in the interest of saving space there are few citations so researchers will need to conduct their own research to locate the relevant studies discussed in general terms in the work.
The substantive examples chapters are divided into three groups: institutions, people, and subjects. Institutions refers both to courts and alternative dispute resolution systems, and different types of legal systems. People refers to people who are part of the legal system, such as lawyers and judges. Subjects refers to people and organizations who are impacted by laws. For the sake of brevity, the author is selective in choosing which areas to focus on, excluding studies on such groups as police and nonprofit organizations. While understandable, this absence is unfortunate because the summaries provided give the reader such helpful, brief overviews of ELR in each area that it would surely be useful to be able to reference summaries for all categories of institutions, people, and subjects. The summaries review examples worldwide but tend to emphasize the United States. This is in line with the rest of the work, which provides information on ELR from a variety of countries, but generally centers on the United States.
The conclusion is a brief two pages summarizing the work and noting that the Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), which the author co-edited with Peter Cane, provides many details beyond the scope of the Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research, including information on ELR topics excluded from the substantive examples section. Readers may wish to follow up on anything they found lacking the Advanced Introduction by reading the relevant section of the Handbook.
Overall, this work is true to its title as an Advanced Introduction, providing a history of and wide-ranging introduction to ELR and examples to illustrate both ELR methodologies and ELR studies in a digestible format.
