Statistics for Lawyers

Rating:
Summary: best law book ever
Review: Some reviewer for a statistics journal called Phil Good's "Applying Statistics in the Courtroom" the best book ever written on statistics and the law. Given the fine books by Finkelstein, by Gastwirth and the deGroot, Feinberg and Kadane book, I think that was a gross overstatement. Phil does however get away from legalese and tries to present key issues.

Finkelstein is a lawyer who with Herbert Robbins helped define what statistical evidence should be. He is well educated in statistics and his first edition was a classic. This book maintains the good features of the first book and provide a nice update with modern advances particularly in genetics. It is an introductory statistics text for lawyers with little or no statistical background and it teaches them the methods utilizing legal cases as examples.

I was very much impressed with the authors' analysis of the Florida vote in the 2000 Presidential election that Finkelstein presented in a talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in New York in August 2002. I heard the talk and discovered that this meticulous and interesting analysis is covered in the book, section 4.5.3 "Election 2000: Who won Florida?" This detail is typical of the nice interplay between statistical methodology and important legal questions. It is just one example of the gems in this book!

The chapters are 1. Descriptive Statistics, 2. How to Count, 3. Elements of Probability, 4. Some Probability Distributions, 5. Statistical Inference for Two Proportions, 6. Comparing Multiple Proportions, 7. Comparing Means, 8. Combining Evidence Across Independent Strata, 9. Sampling Issues, 10. Epidemiology, 11. Survival Analysis, 12. Nonparametric Methods, 13. Regression Methods, 14. More Complex Regression Models.

With many interesting and famous cases as examples this book is valuable to statisticians like me as well as to attorneys.

Rating:
Summary: best law book ever
Review: Some reviewer for a statistics journal called Phil Good's "Applying Statistics in the Courtroom" the best book ever written on statistics and the law. Given the fine books by Finkelstein, by Gastwirth and the deGroot, Feinberg and Kadane book, I think that was a gross overstatement. Phil does however get away from legalese and tries to present key issues.

Finkelstein is a lawyer who with Herbert Robbins helped define what statistical evidence should be. He is well educated in statistics and his first edition was a classic. This book maintains the good features of the first book and provide a nice update with modern advances particularly in genetics. It is an introductory statistics text for lawyers with little or no statistical background and it teaches them the methods utilizing legal cases as examples.

I was very much impressed with the authors' analysis of the Florida vote in the 2000 Presidential election that Finkelstein presented in a talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in New York in August 2002. I heard the talk and discovered that this meticulous and interesting analysis is covered in the book, section 4.5.3 "Election 2000: Who won Florida?" This detail is typical of the nice interplay between statistical methodology and important legal questions. It is just one example of the gems in this book!

The chapters are 1. Descriptive Statistics, 2. How to Count, 3. Elements of Probability, 4. Some Probability Distributions, 5. Statistical Inference for Two Proportions, 6. Comparing Multiple Proportions, 7. Comparing Means, 8. Combining Evidence Across Independent Strata, 9. Sampling Issues, 10. Epidemiology, 11. Survival Analysis, 12. Nonparametric Methods, 13. Regression Methods, 14. More Complex Regression Models.

With many interesting and famous cases as examples this book is valuable to statisticians like me as well as to attorneys.

Rating:
Summary: Statistics for statisticians
Review: This book will prove USELESS unless you already have a strong grasp of statistics concepts. It is NOT a math book though it claims to be one.