American Law and Economics Review Advance Access originally published online on June 14, 2007
American Law and Economics Review 2007 9(1):195-303; doi:10.1093/aler/ahm007
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Should Legal Empiricists Go Bayesian?
Stanford Law School
Send correspondence to: Jeff Strnad, Stanford Law School, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94305-8402, USA E-mail: jstrnad{at}stanford.edu
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Abstract |
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Bayesian empirical approaches appear frequently in fields such as egineering, computer science, political science and medicine, but almost never in law. This article illustrates how such approaches might be very useful in empirical legal studies. In particular, Bayesian approaches enable a much more natural connection between the normative or positive issues that typically motivate such studies and the empirical results.
Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Stanford University. I am grateful for valuable comments from John Donohue, Dan Ho, Max Schanzenbach, two anonymous referees and from workshop participants at the 2007 American Law & Economics Association Meetings, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Southern California Law School, Stanford Law School and Yale Law School. Marc Fernandes, Jonathan Hennessy and Ethan Siller provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors and misjudgments are my own responsibility. I am thankful for generous financial support from the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Stanford Law School.