Tracey George
Professor of Law
Tracey George’s interest in empirical legal scholarship began while she was in college at SMU and continued through law school at Stanford. “I spent my law school summers conducting research with political scientist Lee Epstein, a brilliant scholar who encouraged me to collaborate with her on empirical projects,” she says. “That experience affected the types of question in which I’m interested and the methods that I use to answer them.”
George studies judges and courts, examining the development of law in the federal courts. In her work, she has found that judges are sophisticated decision makers who are influenced by their policy preferences, their views of the law, and the context in which they act. She recently began a study of judicial selection under President George W. Bush.
Arguing that “Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the next big thing in legal intellectual thought,” Professor George developed a ranking system in 2005 to evaluate major law schools based on their scholarly productivity and other factors associated with ELS. “My ranking focuses on the faculty, their credentials and their productivity because law professors are the source of a school’s intellectual life,” she says. She updated her study in August 2006, looking at current faculty at U.S. News’s top-50 Vanderbilt ranked third overall, tied with Cornell and Yale. “Rankings can be fun, but they only tell us a limited amount,” she says. “My ranking isn’t a definitive statement on empirical scholarship at American law schools, but it’s a place to start.”
She believes that “[o]ne of the most encouraging trends in empirical work by law professors is the increased use of a model-based approach to considering the behavior of actors in the legal system and the development of law. Unlike a historical or case study approach, this scholarship offers us the means to understand more fundamental questions with respect to a wider range of legal or law-related events.”
Professor George chaired the entry-level faculty appointments committee in 2005-2006, a year in which Vanderbilt hired three outstanding junior scholars, and is currently a member of the Faculty Senate. She has also worked with students on numerous research projects – both as research assistants on her own research and as an advisor for students’ independent research projects.
