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Home > Law > DePaul Law Review > Vol. 75 > Iss. 2

 

Abstract

The findings of replication studies conducted in the early 2010s

led many to declare that science was in the midst of a “replication

crisis.” Since then, a growing number of reforms have been

proposed and tested. The field of empirical legal studies seems

behind other fields such as psychology, economics, political science,

medicine, biology, and others that have taken significant steps

toward uncovering the general reliability of the field’s empirical

work, investigating the causes of observed unreliability, and

instituting and testing the effects of various reforms. The purpose of

this Article is to summarize what we know about the reliability of

empirical legal studies and to highlight what, exactly, would be

useful to learn. Part I summarizes, in broadbrush terms, what we

know about the reliability of empirical research in fields other than

empirical legal studies. Many fields are thought to be plagued by

replication crises characterized by low rates of successful

replication of randomly drawn samples of studies. These findings

have set off alarm bells. They have also led researchers to explore

what causes replication failures. Some of the causes are individual

researcher-based while others are grounded in the scientific

ecosystem. Part I also describes approaches used across fields to

increase reliability and what we’ve learned about the efficacy of

those approaches. Part II summarizes what we know about the

general reliability of empirical legal studies. While the body of

metaresearch focusing on the field is growing, it is relatively new.

Overall, we know very little about the general reliability of ELS.

Part III sets out a metaresearch agenda for the field. It outlines

several important metaresearch questions about ELS that we do not

yet have answers to but should.

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