What is the ELS blog?

This first post is devoted to explaining why we started this web log.  We hope that the ELS blog will advance productive and interdisciplinary discourse among empirical legal scholars. We believe that this blog will be an especially worthwhile addition to legal and academic discourse at this time due to the recent creation of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the emergence of empirical scholarship in the legal academy as evidenced by the 2006 American Association of Law Schools' Annual Meeting topic and empirical scholarship law school rankings, and the mainstream acceptance of web logs as successful means to convey current information of interest to the legal academy. The ELS blog serves as an online forum to discuss and provide links for emerging empirical legal scholarship, provide conference updates, discuss empirical claims that have emerged in public and political discourse, facilitate discussion for guest empirical scholars and assess current empirical findings and methodologies.

Comments

[Mark Hall and Ron Wright]

The 2004 AALS Conference had a session on IRBs and law professors. Based on that, and some discussions at the Wake Forest law school, we (Mark Hall and Ron Wright) developed a set of FAQs about legal research and IRBs, which we're happy to share with anyone who wants to see them, or post on this blog if someone tells us how to do that.

Ed. note: These IRB FAQs have now been posted on the ELS Blog at: http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/irb.html
-jjc

[Joe Miller]

I think it would be helpful to see discussion on this blog about IRBs, and the learning curve for law profs in working with their home IRBs. I attended the AALS January 2006 meeting and don't recall seeing or hearing, amid all the encouragement for more empirical work, a word about IRBs (what they are, how they work, etc.).

Just a thought. And thanks for launching this blog!