Causal Inference, Selection Bias, and Their Implications for Legal Theory and Practice

New developments of causal inference have revolutionized the way we use data, statistics, and research design and provided a new suite of qualitative and quantitative tools to study long-standing questions in the social sciences. One of the contexts in which these methods are being applied is the interdisciplinary field of empirical legal studies, the importance of which is reflected in a number of high-quality peer-reviewed journals in this area emerging over the past two decades. This project will apply recent tools and methods in causal inference to a variety of problems in the social sciences and try to provide a rigorous and unifying framework to study inequality and justice quantitatively.