Professor Richard Lempert at the University of Michigan Law School has just completed a week as a guest blogger at Empirical Legal Studies. He’s written passionately about how he thinks legal scholars should use data, and the posts are definitely provocative.

I’m highlighting Lempert’s postings here because each of my fellow CreditSlips bloggers do empirical research about credit and bankruptcy issues. We care about the quality of available data and about how data are used. Debates about data were a high profile and controversial part of the recent bankruptcy reform process, and I suspect this trend will continue. Lempert’s last post raises a particularly important point about the difficulty and importance of collecting data, as opposed to using precoded publicly available data sets (Dept of Justice crime statistics, for example). He argues that collecting and preparing data is an important scholarly activity that deserves the respect and recognition of the legal academy. This point is particularly salient in the world of private law (including payment law, secured transactions, debtor-creditor law) in which the transactions are hidden from public view and much of the data are claimed as proprietary. Without painstaking original data collection, whether quantitative or qualitative, the realities of these important legal systems will not be understood.