Empirical scholarship on law and courts is generating datasets and research methods at an unprecedented pace, yet a substantial knowledge gap persists across the various disciplines active in this area. The purpose of this one-week workshop is to assist in particular early-career researchers with the uptake of new research tools.
Workshop participants will learn to use new datasets on the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights and national high courts through presentations and tutorials. They will discuss theoretical developments and consider whether – and how – the gathered data can advance the collective understanding of judicial behaviour.
All participants will receive guidance in the hands-on programming sessions exploring parts of datasets and learning analytical techniques – notably computational text analysis – using the R programming language. The first day of the workshop will be dedicated to an intensive introductory programming session in R. The lecturers will offer continuous assistance with R during the week.
An additional core theme running through this year’s workshop will be concepts and measurement. Drawing on extensive experience with manually labelled datasets, the organisers will convene tutorials covering the operationalization and measurement of (legal) concepts for subsequent analysis. Participants will learn about how to organize the process of manually coding legal texts, preparing codebooks, and ensuring and measuring coding reliability. The concepts and measurement material will be presented for the benefit of both quantitative and qualitative scholars.
Confirmed speakers at the workshop include, among others, Lee Epstein (University of Southern California), Urška Šadl (EUI), Daniel Naurin (Oslo), Johan Lindholm (Umeå), Øyvind Stiansen (Oslo), Joshua Fjelstul (University of Geneva), Philipp Schroeder (LMU Munich), Michal Ovádek (UCL) and Louisa Boulaziz (Oslo).
To apply, send an up-to-date CV and a short motivation letter (up to 500 words) outlining how your research would benefit from the workshop to louisa.boulaziz@arena.uio.no as a single PDF file. Applications must be received by midnight 15 July 2023. The organizers will offer a limited number of scholarships to cover travel and accommodation expenses (up to 400 EUR). No participation fee will be charged.