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2011 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1713 (2011)
The Origins, Nature, and Promise of Empirical Legal Studies and a Response to Concerns

handle is hein.journals/unilllr2011 and id is 1723 raw text is: THE ORIGINS, NATURE, AND
PROMISE OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL
STUDIES AND A RESPONSE TO
CONCERNS
Theodore Eisenberg*
This Article describes the origins of three movements in legal
academia: empirical legal studies (ELS), law and society, and law and
economics. It then quantifies the distribution across scholarly fields
(for example, economics and psychology) of authors in these move-
ments' journals and reports the impact of the movements' scholarly
journals. By focusing on two leading law and economics journals,
this Article also explores the effect of a journal being centered in law
schools rather than in a social science discipline. It suggests that ELS
has achieved rapid growth and impact within the academic legal
community because of (1) its association with law schools, and (2) its
receptiveness to contributions by scholars from all social science dis-
ciplines. Concerns about the quality and growth of ELS are found to
lack persuasive support.
What is empirical legal studies (ELS) and where did it come from?
These questions are worth asking because, in a few years, ELS expanded
from an unstructured enterprise without central loci, to include a journal
(the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS)), to include what has be-
come perhaps the largest annual refereed academic legal conference in
the world (the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS)), to in-
clude a scholarly society (the Society for Empirical Legal Studies
(SELS)), and to include, of course, at least one blog.' It is international,
with ELS conferences conducted outside of the United States in Israel,
* Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Statistical Sciences, Cornell
University. Portions of an earlier version of this paper were presented as part of a keynote speech at
the Asian Law and Economics Association Meeting, August 23-24, 2010, Beijing, and an earlier ver-
sion of this paper will appear in Hebrew in the Tel Aviv University Law Review. I would like to thank
Shari Seidman Diamond, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, and Joshua Wright for comments and Matthew
Heise for excellent research assistance.
1. See EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD., http://www.elsblog.org/ (last visited July 25,2011).

1713

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