Academic Integrity and Legal Scholarship in the Wake of Exxon Shipping, Footnote 17

Published in the Stanford Law and Policy Review 21: 33-50 (Symposium)

Lee Epstein
Charles E. Clarke

In Footnote 17 of Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 128 S.Ct. 2605 (2008), the Court "decline[d] to rely" on studies funded in part by Exxon. We argue that courts and attorneys should not assess the integrity of academic work solely by whether an interested party funded it. Rather, the legal community should adopt the standards already in place in the scientific community. We explain the most prominent of these standards—reliability, validity, and transparency—and demonstrate how, with the help of empirically minded law scholars, appellate court judges and litigators could apply them.

Click here for the article.
Click here for the data (Stata .dta file) (posted on 6.1.2010)