ABSTRACT
The theme of this book is empirical assessment of the performance of legal institutions. While quantitative methods have been used in social sciences for decades, they did not arrive in legal studies until around the beginning of this millennium. Nonetheless, empirical methods attained prominence in legal academia in one decade. The Society for Empirical Legal Studies (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/sels/) organizes an annual conference with presenters from all corners of the world. Many law faculties, from the US to Europe to Asia, including my home institution at Academia Sinica (www.iias.sinica.edu.tw/en), have established research centers for empirical legal studies (www.els.iias.sinica.edu.tw). Despite the outpouring of empirical scholarship, practitioners of quantitative legal analysis find that there are not many monographs that weave together empirical works. Granted, leading scholars, such as Lee Epstein, Richard Posner, William Landes, Cass Sunstein, Tom Ginsburg, Ian Ayres, have published empirics-centered books; and I have very recently published a book on takings compensation from an empirical perspective. Still, the number of published empirical books is not a good indication of the influence of the quantitative approach in law. And a majority of the existing books focus on judicial behaviors in the US. That is, only one branch, only one country.
