Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay

The modern empirical legal studies movement has well-known antecedents in the law and society and law and economics traditions of the latter half of the 20th century. Less well known is the body of empirical research on legal phenomena from the period prior to World War II. This paper is an extensive bibliographic essay that surveys the English language empirical legal research from approximately 1940 and earlier. The essay is arranged around the themes in the research: criminal justice, civil justice (general studies of civil litigation, auto accident litigation and compensation, divorce, small claims, jurisdiction and procedure, civil juries), debt and bankruptcy, banking, appellate courts, legal needs, legal profession (including legal education), and judicial staffing and selection. Accompanying the essay is an extensive bibliography of research articles, books, and reports

Geographically Weighted Local Statistics Applied to Binary Data

This paper considers the application of geographically weighting to summary statistics for binary data. We argue that geographical smoothing techniques that are applied to descriptive statistics for ratio and interval scale data may also be applied to descriptive statistics for binary categorical data. Here we outline how this may be done, focussing attention on the odds ratio statistic used for summarising the linkage between a pair of binary variables. An example of this is applied to data relating to house sales, based on over 30,000 houses in the United Kingdom. The method is used to demonstrate that time trends in the building of detached houses vary throughout the country

The effect of data aggregation on a poisson regression model of Canadian migration

A Statistics Canada data set for Canadian migration data at the census division level incorporating information on income tax for 1986 has already been presented. This matrix of 260 × 260 flows was used to calibrate a set of Poisson regression models by utilizing flows for the aggregate population. In this paper, the relatively high spatial resolution is used to test for aggregation effects as the original 260 units are combined to form fewer, synthetic regions with larger areas. A series of simulation experiments are performed with three different aggregation algorithms to create 130, 65, and ultimately 10 (corresponding to the provinces) synthetic regions. Average results from the experiments are compared with the original model. Results are obtained that suggest that, in this case, obvious aggregation effects similar to those observed elsewhere (by Openshaw) are not observed