Some Things Are Actually Nails: The Value of Randomized Experiments Across Legal Theories

Experiments sometimes get a bad rap. Critics allege that they don’t illuminate how the real world works, are subject to p-hacking and manipulation, and often don’t study the most important populations of interest. We examine historical uses of experiments to generate knowledge for legal academia. Recently, experiments have become associated with law and economics as part of a broader coupling of quantitative empirical work with law and economics.

But experimentation is a highly adaptable, if imperfect, research method that can support causal claims and test assumptions that are useful across many legal theories, including law and political economy. We discuss the strengths, limits, and future directions of experiments as a mode of legal research.