In January 2006, the Association of American Law Schools held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The theme for that meeting, “Empirical Scholarship: What Should We Study and How Should We Study It?”1 is an indicator that things are changing in the realm of academic legal research.
Traditionally and historically, the great weight of legal scholarship has been based on doctrine and theory.2 Proponents of legal empirical research, which is based on observation and experience, claim that traditional methods are enhanced by the employment of a solid base of up-to-date empirical information,3 and that empirical research has the ability to help legal scholars determine “whether a particular law or process is actually achieving its stated objectives.”4
In addition to traditional resources, there are several notable resources for researchers interested in the field of empirical legal research. There is the newly published Journal of Empirical Legal Studies5 and the Empirical Legal Studies blog.6 In addition, the First Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, jointly organized by Cornell Law School, NYU School of Law, and the University of Texas Law School, is to be held in October 2006.7 Papers for the conferences are available on SSRN.8
1 N. William Hines, Empirical Research: What Should We Study and How Should We Study It?, Association of American Law Schools, http://www.aals.org/am2006/theme.html (last visited August 28, 2006).
2 Peter H. Schuck, Why Don’t Law Professors Do More Empirical Research? 39 J. Legal Educ. 323, 329 (1989).
3 Michael Heise, The Past, Present, and Future of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Judicial Decision Making and the New Empiricism, 2002 U. Ill. L. Rev 819, 824.
4 Hines, supra note 1.
5 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (Blackwell Publishing, c2004 - ).
6 Empirical Legal Studies, http://www.elsblog.org (last visited August 28, 2006).
7 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, University of Texas School of Law, http://www.utexas.edu/law/conferences/cels2006/ (last visited August 28, 2006).
8 Empirical Legal Studies Conferences (CELS), Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=884311 (last visited August 28, 2006).