Bob Lawless (Ill.) asked me to post the following Call for Papers for the 2013 MLEA, and I am delighted to do so. University of Illinois College of Law will host the conference and the deadline for proposals is August 1, 2013. A brief description of the conference follows (more details here).

"The University of Illinois College of Law and the Illinois Program on Law, Behavior & Social Science are hosting the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Law & Economics Association on October 11 & 12, 2013 in Champaign, Illinois. To participate, you need not be a Midwestern economist or even an economist or a Midwesterner. The event consists of law professors and economists presenting papers with varying degrees of law-and-economics content, ranging from empirical analyses and formal economic modeling to legal philosophy and doctrinal papers infused with economic thinking. Presentations will begin Friday morning and end early- to mid-afternoon on Saturday."

A recent post by David Schwartz (Chicago-Kent)--wondering whether empirical legal scholars should shoulder "special ethical responsibilities"--ignited a fascinating (and timely) discussion over at Concurring Opinions. Two reasons prompt Schwartz's concerns. "First, nearly all law reviews lack formal peer review. The lack of peer review potentially permits dubious data to be reported without differentiation alongside quality data. Second, empirical legal scholarship has the potential to be extremely influential on policy debates because it provides 'data' to substantiate or refute claims. Unfortunately, many consumers of empirical legal scholarship — including other legal scholars, practitioners, judges, the media, and policy makers — are not sophisticated in empirical methods."

Schwartz's concern focuses on what he calls "weak data." By that he means "reporting [results from] data that encourages weak or flawed inferences, that is not statistically significant, or that is of extremely limited value and thus may be misused." Specifically, "[t]he precise question I have been considering is under what circumstances one should report weak data, even with an appropriate explanation of the methodology used and its potential limitations."

Whether you agree with Schwartz or not, he raises an important question that warrants attention.

Responding to the recent debacle involving a grad student uncovering a blundering error in a paper by noted Harvard economists (here), Betsey Stevenson (Mich.) and Justin Wolfers (Mich.) initiated a (now growing) list of suggestions on how to minimize errors in empirical research. Not surprisingly, others, including Andrew Gelman (Columbia), have added to the list (here). While the list will inevitably grow, it already includes basic, helpful reminders for even the most experienced researchers.

Over at PrawfsBlawg, John Pfaff (Fordham) provides a cautionary reminder that most empiricists cannot hear often enough. Re-defining key variables can influence results and re-defined variables are frequently difficult to detect, particularly in large, complex, longitudinal datasets. That is, too often, secondary analyses are undertaken without necessary due-diligence involving the underlying data. Among Pfaff's take-aways:

"If nothing else, this is a strong warning against casually running empirical models, a growing problem in legal scholarship. Legal academics shouldn’t just get their IT departments to install Stata on their computers, download some data, and then start running some regressions. It  can take years to fully understand what a dataset looks like, what it is really measuring, its strengths and weaknesses. People who just run some quick regressions and then send them off to a law review are likely moving knowledge backwards, not forwards, since the risk of bad results is too great."