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Legal scholars, the mockingbirds of the academy, are great borrowers of scholarly methods. We experiment with the tools of historians, economists, sociologists, literary theorists, moral philosophers, and others, often to great effect. Yet despite these innovative efforts to study legal doctrines and institutions through different lenses, legal scholars have yet to identify their own unique empirical methodology. Instead, empirical legal methods are often standard applications of basic social science methods to subjects of (sometimes trifling) legal interest. In doing this kind of work, law professors may ably step