Empirical legal studies have become an important field of law in the international arena, and many top Western law schools have established institutions for empirical legal research. However, the development of this field in Asia still needs to be strengthened. In response to the call for the University of Macau to become a world-class university and to promote the modernization and development of legal research, the Faculty of Law of University of Macau has established the Center for Empirical Legal Studies. The research team is composed of researchers from various interdisciplinary backgrounds such as law, criminology, social sciences, statistics, and computer science, working together to explore the effective interaction between empirical legal research and normative research.
This center is committed to empowering legal research with big data technology at the methodological level. For example, by combining methods such as natural language processing and statistical inference, legal research can shift from the paradigm of legal doctrine, socio-legal studies, and descriptive empirical legal research to the paradigm of data science. The center also actively collaborates with the government to carry out work related to the prevention and reduction of crime, providing high-quality policy references to the government decision-makers and collaborating to achieve the goal of digitalization of the judicial system in the Macau Special Administrative Region.