Study

Lawyers constantly evaluate and make legal arguments based on facts about the world. In litigation, for example, lawyers often must engage and depose expert witnesses who are hired to conduct empirical analyses to establish facts that serve as the basis for the case. Often, however, such empirical “facts'' are not universally accepted by the parties to the case. The debate over these facts is usually a debate about the empirical analysis itself. Empirical methods can be difficult to understand, but a lot of today’s empirical analyses use only a handful of methods. In this course, you will learn about these methods, how they are applied in litigation, and the main legal questions that they have been applied to address. The goal of this course is not to become a producer of empirical analyses, and students will not attempt to conduct any empirical analysis. But because the goal of the course is to become a better consumer of empirical analyses and evidence, most of class time will be devoted to understanding the intuition of empirical methods and how they should be applied. We will use math every single class, but the math we will use is not beyond what you learned in high school. With better intuition about the common empirical methods and how they should be applied, students will be able to better engage with expert witnesses hired to conduct empirical analysis in litigation and to ask the right questions if presented with arguments based on empirical research.

Fall 2025

Course Number	Course Credits	Evaluation Method	Instructor
319.01	2	Final Exam Practical exercises Class participation	Michael D. Frakes