Legal Data Lab Empirical Legal Research Specialist, School of Law

UVA Health • Charlottesville, VA

11d • Hybrid

About The Position

The University of Virginia School of Law seeks an Empirical Legal Data Specialist to support the Legal Data Lab within the Arthur J. Morris Law Library. The Lab supports empirical legal scholarship by applying data science solutions to help patrons understand and explain complex legal phenomena. The Specialist will support empirical legal studies and AI-based projects undertaken by Law School faculty, administrators, and students. The role involves applying data-driven research to advance understanding of legal and social issues, while rapidly learning and evaluating computational and statistical methods as research needs evolve. The position requires strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, an understanding of social scientific research methods, and the ability to communicate complex findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

This is a full-time, exempt University Staff position with benefits. Most work must be performed in person at the Law School, with the opportunity to perform a limited amount of work remotely in accordance with Law School policy. The School of Law is located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in data science, statistics, quantitative/computational social science, or a related field.
• Two or more years of relevant experience independently conducting quantitative or computational social science research and using high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in data science, statistics, quantitative/computational social science, or a related field; strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience with web design, HTML, and APIs.
• Expertise in one or more programming languages, such as Python, R, or Stata.
• Experience working concurrently on multiple projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience supporting data-intensive research projects, including projects that led to publication in peer-reviewed journals or conference presentations.
• Knowledge of the underlying architecture of generative AI.
• Understanding of the life cycle of data-intensive research projects.
• Understanding of the U.S. legal system or strong motivation to learn.

Responsibilities

• Collect, clean, integrate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources and present results in a visually compelling manner.
• Support data quality, documentation, validation, and research reproducibility.
• Regularly review relevant social scientific literature and stay abreast of emerging social scientific, computational, and statistical methods relevant to empirical legal studies.
• Attend and/or present at one or two conferences per year.
• Explore, evaluate, adapt, and implement appropriate computational and statistical methods in response to project-specific research needs.
• Develop, maintain, and update internal and public-facing research databases and data resources.
• Maintain and contribute to the development of the Legal Data Lab website and other public-facing research infrastructure.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time