Program on using court records in research & teaching

[EVENT] [RESEARCH] UMKC School of Law is hosting an interesting conference Oct. 7-8 on using court records in research and teaching. I couldn't find the program announcement on the web to link to, so I'm sharing excerpts from an email message posted to several listservs by one of the organizers, Paul D. Callister. Registration form here.

Federal Civil Court Records of the National Archives: Opportunities for Empirical, Historical and Legal Research and Curriculum Design

Court Data and Selection Bias
Ahmed E. Taha, Assoc. Prof., Wake Forest Univ. School of Law
-- Prof. Taha will describe how empirical studies of litigation are subject to selection bias due to the lack of detailed data about court cases. * * *

Keynote Address:The Importance of Preserving Historic Information About the Legal System
Theodore Eisenberg, Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
-- Prof. Eisenberg will discuss of the importance of historical knowledge about the legal system's performance in assessing contemporary debate about civil justice, such as the need for historical data about award amounts, class actions, pretrial dispositions and motions to exclude evidence.

The Long Road to Dred Scott: Suing for Freedom in the Shadow of Slavery
David T. Konig, Prof. of History and Law, Washington Univ.
-- Prof. Konig will describe the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, * * * He will examine the way in which archival court records of "freedom suits," including that of Dred Scott, have served as the basis for interdisciplinary undergraduate research courses * * *.

Serendipity in the Stacks, Fortuity in the Archives: Preservation, Browsing, and Legal History
Michael Hoeflich, Kane Professor of Law, Univ. of Kansas
-- Prof. Hoeflich will discuss serendipitous discoveries in legal history, and history in general, deriving from unintended discoveries in collections of sources. He will also address the potential detriment to the historians of tomorrow if their historical records-to-be are destroyed today.

Researching Federal Civil Court Records
Lawrence H. Larsen, Prof. Emeritus of History, UMKC
-- * * * Prof. Larsen will speak about his use of archival records in connection with his teaching and scholarship, including the writing and publication of Federal Justice in Western Missouri: The Judges, the Cases, the Times.

The Washington University Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse: Using Court Records for Research, Teaching, and Policymaking
Margo Schlanger, Prof. of Law, Washington Univ. in St. Louis
-- Prof. Schlanger will describe the soon-to-be-launched Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, * * *.

Using Missouri State Court Records in Socio-legal Research
Gary Kowaluk, J.D., M.A. in Sociology, Ph.D. ABD, UMKC Department of Sociology
-- Mr. Kowaluk will discuss * * * the death penalty and wrongful convictions in Missouri using data obtained from Missouri Trial Judge Reports. * * *

Categories: empirical-studies, UMKC, event,