Is Every Law for Everyone? Assessing Access to National Legislation through Official Legal Databases around the World.

Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes' titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a 'minimum viable' OLD.

On getting it right by being wrong: A case study of how flawed research may become self-fulfilling at last.

Scientists prominently argue that the COVID-19 pandemic stems not least from people’s inability to understand exponential growth. They increasingly cite evidence from a classic psychological experiment published some 45 years prior to the first case of COVID-19. Despite—or precisely because of—becoming such a canonical study (more often cited than read), its critical design flaws went completely unnoticed.

The Hog Cycle of Law Professors: An Econometric Time Series Analysis of the Entry-Level Job Market in Legal Academia.

The (German) market for law professors fulfils the conditions for a hog cycle: In the short run, supply cannot be extended or limited; future law professors must be hired soon after they first present themselves, or leave the market; demand is inelastic. Using a comprehensive German dataset, we show that the number of market entries today is negatively correlated with the number of market entries eight years ago. This suggests short-sighted behavior of young scholars at the time when they decide to prepare for the market.