LAW 26 Introductory Statistical Analysis for Law, Policy, and Justice Studies

Units: 4
Prerequisites: MATH 92S Intermediate Algebra (STEM), MATH 96 Pre-Statistics, or high school intermediate algebra each with a minimum grade of “C”, or qualifying placement.
Corequisites: LAW 70.
Advisories: Ability to read at the 12th grade level.
This course provides the tools, concepts, and framework for students to become sophisticated consumers of quantitative evidence and social science through an introduction to the basic statistical methods and analyses commonly used in law, policy, and justice studies and applications, including in sociological research, civil rights litigation, public policy formulation, and social justice advocacy. It provides statistical methodological training and skills through the examination of social and cultural manifestations of truth and the interdisciplinary study of class, ethnicity, gender, and race, including a primary focus on one of the following ethnic groups in the United States: Asian Americans, African Americans, Latino-Americans/ Latinx/ Chicanos, and Native Americans. It also relates lessons of quantitative thinking to topical materials that are accessible and relevant to working for justice and social change. Students learn techniques to distinguish credible statistical evidence from misleading statistical claims. Statistical methods to be discussed include use of probability and predictive techniques, as well as hypothesis testing, to facilitate decision-making in the justice system and in the fields of law and public policy. Topics to be discussed include descriptive and inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, probability and sampling distributions, measures of central tendency and dispersion, correlation and linear regression, multivariate regression, and analysis of variance, chi-square and t-tests. The course involves the application of technology/software for statistical analysis to sociological research in law, policy, and justice studies, including the interpretation of the relevance of the statistical findings. Examples will be provided of the application of statistical methods to problems encountered in law, public and social policy, social justice advocacy, and the justice system. The course will focus on a number of empirical debates as a springboard to teach the logic and terminology of statistical/econometric evaluation of law and policy in the justice system and society. No background, beyond high school algebra, is assumed. Anyone who 1) hopes to work in litigation (e.g., antitrust, business law, civil rights, corporate law, discrimination, environmental law, securities), in the administration of justice, in social justice advocacy, or in policy, 2) wants to be a more informed person, 3) desires to understand social and cultural manifestations of truth as a tool to serve social justice efforts for identified minoritized groups, or 3) wants to understand the challenges of establishing causal relationships, and who does not already have a strong understanding of statistics, will find this course useful. (UC, CSU, C-ID SOCI 125)