A friend reports over on Facebook that s/he had run a number of empirical tests of a certain claim and had found no evidence the claim was true. S/he bemoans that this null result - which I think is actually more interesting than a positive result, since it is counter the conventional wisdom - means that the piece has become much harder to place in a top journal. And s/he's right. The publication bias against null results is sufficiently well known as to have its own Wikipedia entry.
Call me old-fashioned. Call me a curmudgeon. Call me a stick in the mud. Call me a crank with an idée fixe. All too true. But I still don't see why leal academics shouldn't stick to what presumably we do better than any other social scientist; namely, going out and reading the damned cases and figuring out what the rule of law is. And then throw in some policy analysis and call it a day.
