Updates and New Directions

So I have been doing a lot of thinking over Thanksgiving break (and therefore did not have as much time to complete my actual work, but that's another story. :) ). One thing I have been feeling frustrated about is the fact that I simply know too little about the tools that would enable me to understand law well -- namely, the social sciences.

All of the social sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, antropology, political science... etc., each has so much to say about how people in fact behave, and offer their answers and perspectives on how people, both as individuals and as collectives, act. These answers are paramountly important in a legal context, because after all, law is intended to regulate and change human behavior. I can't believe that so many legal academics talk about what law ought to be, or how legislation and statutes affect behavior, without explicitly specifying what views and assumptions of human nature and human behavior they are talking about.

Moreover, through talking to a new friend, I also realized that I have no idea how to do empirical research, should I ever want to. So many questions in law have actual empirical answers. The whole debate about whether juries should make decisions rather than judges, for example, have actual answers in reality, if we agree that accuracy and efficiency are values that we should maximize (though this is debatable, I agree. Earlier I wrote a short reaction paper arguing that those should not be the only values. :) ). Or whether certain voting law, or statutes limiting freedom of speech, or affirmative action legislaion, or court decisions ordering integration of schools -- do these laws work and do they achieve their intended effects? Often legal academics have no idea, and they just sit there and speculate and argue about theory and doctrines, which I find frustrating.

The point is there are testable hypothesis in law, but apparently very few people are actually doing the research to find out whether these hypotheses are true. I heard that empirical research is time-consuming and boring, and I'd much rather be in la-la theory land. (This is part of my attraction to law and narratives -- so easy and requires no empirical analysis whatsoever!)

On the other hand, if I ever want to know how to use the tools of empirical research, and perhaps I do, now is the time to learn how to do it.

So, over break, I realized that what I should try to do next semester is to cross-register for courses in the School of Arts and Sciences. Perhaps I can audit a few, or take statistics or psychology or some other courses for credit.

My undergraduate years, alas, were spent taking graduate level seminars on super in-depth topics like Hegel's Aesthetics or the Political Economy of the French Revolution. They were really fun, but I got very little overview of entire fields. Now I really wish I had that so that I can connect all these ideas and theories together in a coherent way, and understand how they speak to each other and argue with each other. It's sad to realize, 5 years after one graduates college, that one should have taken more large, freshman-filled intro courses.

Nonetheles, I think this is what I will do next semester. I need to find out how to actually do this and how I can get credit for doing it, but I definitely need to receive some formal training in the social sciences and methods of quantitative analysis.

In other news, my parents are proposing to pay for my plane ticket to go to Switzerland, to visit my aunt who lives on the Swiss-German border, and for me to ski in Zurich if I want. This is tempting. Should I do it?