This guide provides links to general sources for statistical research as well as resources for federal, state and international statistics.
Online resources are often the most effective place to search for statistical information, as they provide the most current statistics available and are updated more frequently than print resources. However, the Law Library does own several current print statistical resources in its Reference collection. Some online resources to start general statistical research are listed below.
Empirical Methods in Law, 2e by 
Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U. S. Justice Statistics
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the U.S. Department of Justice is one of the smallest of the U.S. principal statistical agencies but shoulders one of the most expansive and detailed legal mandates among those agencies. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics examines the full range of BJS programs and suggests priorities for data collection. BJS's data collection portfolio is a solid body of work, well justified by public information needs or legal requirements and a commendable effort to meet its broad mandate given less-than-commensurate fiscal resources. The book identifies some major gaps in the substantive coverage of BJS data, but notes that filling those gaps would require increased and sustained support in terms of staff and fiscal resources. In suggesting strategic goals for BJS, the book argues that the bureau's foremost goal should be to establish and maintain a strong position of independence. To avoid structural or political interference in BJS work, the report suggests changing the administrative placement of BJS within the Justice Department and making the BJS directorship a fixed-term appointment. In its thirtieth year, BJS can look back on a solid body of accomplishment; this book suggests further directions for improvement to give the nation the justice statistics--and the BJS--that it deserves.
Statistics for Lawyers (2nd ed.) by
Designed to introduce law students, law teachers, practitioners, and judges to the basic ideas of mathematical probability and statistics as they have been applied in the law, the book consists of sections of exposition followed by real-world cases and case studies in which stastical data have played a role. Readers are asked to apply the theory to the facts, to calculate results (a pocket calculator is sufficient), and to explore legal issues raised by quantitative findings, while the author's own calculations and comments are given in the back of the book. The cases and case studies reflect a broad variety of legal subjects, including antidiscrimination, mass torts, taxation, school finance, identification evidence, preventive detention, handwriting disputes, voting, environmental protection, antitrust, and the death penalty. The first edition has been used in law, statistics, and social science courses, and in 1991 was selected by the University of Michigan Law Review as one of the important law books of the year. This second edition includes many new problems reflecting current developments in the law, including a new chapter on epidemiology.
Statistics for Lawyers (3rd ed.) by
This classic text, first published in 1990, is designed to introduce law students, law teachers, practitioners, and judges to the basic ideas of mathematical probability and statistics as they have been applied in the law. The third edition includes over twenty new sections, including the addition of timely topics, like New York City police stops, exonerations in death-sentence cases, projecting airline costs, and new material on various statistical techniques such as the randomized response survey technique, rare-events meta-analysis, competing risks, and negative binomial regression. The book consists of sections of exposition followed by real-world cases and case studies in which statistical data have played a role. The reader is asked to apply the theory to the facts, to calculate results (a hand calculator is sufficient), and to explore legal issues raised by quantitative findings. The authors' calculations and comments are given in the back of the book. As with previous editions, the cases and case studies reflect a broad variety of legal subjects, including antidiscrimination, mass torts, taxation, school finance, identification evidence, preventive detention, handwriting disputes, voting, environmental protection, antitrust, sampling for insurance audits, and the death penalty. A chapter on epidemiology was added in the second edition. In 1991, the first edition was selected by the University of Michigan Law Review as one of the important law books of the year.
Statistics in the Law by
The book will serve primarily as a user's manual or desk reference for the expert witness-lawyer team and secondarily as a textbook or supplemental textbook for upper level undergraduate statistics students. It starts with two articles by masters of the trade, Paul Meier and Franklin Fisher.It then explains the distinction between the Frye and Daughbert standards for expert testimony, and how these standards play out in court. The bulk of the book is concerned with individual cases ranging over a wide variety of topics, such as electronic draw poker (does it require skill to play),employment discrimination (how to tell whether an employer discriminated against older workers in deciding whom to fire), driving while black (did the New Jersey State Police disproportionately stop blacks), jury representativeness (is a jury a representative cross section of the community), jurieshearing death penalty cases (are such juries biased toward a guilty verdict, and does the Supreme Court care), the civil incarceration of violent sexual offenders after having served their jail sentences (can future dangerousness be predicted), do data from multiple choice examinations support anallegation of copying, whether rental agents in an apartment complex steered African-American prospects to one part of the complex, how much tax is owed after an audit that used a random sample, whether an inventor falsified his notebook in an effort to fool the Patent Office, and whether ballotshad been tampered with in an election. The book concludes with two recent English cases, one in which a woman was accused of murdering her infant sons because both died of \cot death" or \sudden death syndrome," (she was convicted, but later exonerated), and how Bayesian analyses can (or moreprecisely), cannot be presented in UK courts. In each study, the statistical analysis is shaped to address the relevant legal questions, and draws on whatever methods in statistics might shed light on those questions.