The Importance of Empirical Methods in Legal Research: The Case of Criminology, Economic Analysis of Law, and Law as an Algorithm

This chapter examines the empirical methods applicable in Criminology, Economic Analysis of Law, and the law embodied in the form of algorithms. The first part of the paper explores the empirical research methods used in Criminology. Focusing on the fundamental features of criminological methodology, the chapter elaborates on fundamental and applied research. The second part focuses on interdisciplinary methodology applicable in the field of Economic Analysis of Law (EAL), and examines the accompanying controversies and challenges generated by the development of behavioral research that has fundamentally changed the findings of the EAL. The third part elaborates on the importance of empirical data in the context of law as an algorithm and the “new trichotomy” reflecting the nature of data: text-driven law, data-driven law, and code-driven law. The trichotomy emerges as a result of an attempt to transform legal norms into machine-readable algorithms, as well as to ensure the application of these modalities in the legal context. The authors discuss the importance of empirical methods in law and the “extension” of standard legal methodology.