Litigation-driven research: a case study of lawyer-social scientist collaboration

Abstract

The use of social science research in the legal process has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1974, Friedman called this area one of the "growth stocks" of law and the social sciences, and by 1984, Loh estimated that more books on the interface of law and the social sciences had been published in the last dozen years than in the preceding three-fourths of a century.' Our focus in this diverse area is on collaborative efforts of lawyers and social scientists to collect survey evidence for litigation. We draw from our experiences in a class action suit filed by the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union Foundation (CCLUF) in 1983 on behalf of inmates at the Connecticut -women's prison at Niantic. Some elements of our story bear directly on collecting evidence for prison litigation, but we also address issues that apply to other litigation contexts, including sources of misunderstanding between lawyers and social scientists in the collaboration, and the standards courts may invoke in evaluating social science methods and findings.