Law as Science 2021

Series of Comparative Law

  • A General Method For Comparative Law

    Professor John Reitz (Iowa College of Law)

    This lecture will introduce a general method for comparative study of law and illustrate it using the comparison of juries in the United States and lay judges in the civil law and especially in China.

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  • What are the Methods to Compare Constitutionally?

    Professor Marie-Luce Paris (University College Dublin)

    This lecture will critically discuss the methods used in comparative constitutional law as exposed by Tushnet (Advanced Introduction to Comparative Constitutional Law, 2nd ed, EE 2018) and revisited by Dixon (How to Compare Constitutionally: An Essay in Honour of Mark Tushnet, [2020] UNSWLRS 21 University of New South Wales Law Research Series). The speaker will use examples of her recent research (and teaching activities) to illustrate how to use these methods.

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  • Comparative Chinese Law

    Professor Shitong Qiao (Duke Law School)

    In this talk I plan to situate Chinese law in the country-specific comparative legal studies in the American legal academia in the past 70 years. By exploring the rise, fall and legacies of several country-specific comparative legal studies, I hope to explore together with the audience the future of Chinese law in American legal academia, and more broadly, how Chinese legal studies can contribute to general comparative legal studies and legal theory. I will draw examples from my own research and others.

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Law as Science Fall 2021

The Art of Social Science Modeling: An Economic Analysis of Criminal Law

Professor Kenneth Dau-Schmidt

(Indiana University, Maurer School of Law)

Social science modeling involves making simplifying assumptions, deriving testable hypotheses, and empirically testing those hypotheses. The art of social science modeling is knowing which simplifying assumptions to make so you can model and understand the phenomenon, while preserving the usefulness of the model for predicting real life events. In this presentation, Professor Dau-Schmidt will discuss economic modeling and his work in developing an economic model of the criminal law as a preference shaping policy.

Law as (Colonial) Science: Imperial legacies in the study of politics and Islam

Professor Iza Hussin

(University of Cambridge)

Beginning with discussion of colonial ideas of law as science in the British Indian empire, this talk traces the ongoing imperialism of categories in the work of comparative social science, with a focus on politics and law, their methods and assumptions.