Empirical Legal Studies

Northwestern Univ. L. Rev.'s 7th Annual "Empirical Issue": Call For Papers

If evidence of empirical legal studies’ growth was not already obvious enough in the peer-reviewed world, some movement in traditional student law reviews also evidences a turn toward ELS as well. And no more so than perhaps the Northwestern University Law Review which is pleased to announce its seventh annual issue dedicated to empirical legal scholarship, to be published in Spring 2026. The student editors "seek to bring cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, empirical work to our legal audience, and enrich our understanding of the law, legal actors, and legal doctrine through robust and reliable examination of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method data."

The student editors note that the "exclusive submission window for the Vol. 120 Empirical Issue of the Northwestern University Law Review will open on April 1, 2025, and run until April 28, 2025. A subset of submissions will be selected to move forward to peer review. The Law Review promises make every effort to notify authors of rejection or of advancement to peer review by June 30, 2025. Final publication decisions will be issued by August 10, 2025." Submissions must land in the 15,000-30,000 word count range.

For those interested, additional details are found here.

CELS 2025--Save the Date

At the request of the CELS 2025 conference co-organizers, David Hyman, Neel Sukhatme, and Josh Teitelbaum, I am delighted to pass along the following information:

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

24-25 October 2025

 

The 19th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) will be held on 24-25 October 2025, at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

 

More conference information here.

 

CELS 2025 is co-sponsored by Georgetown Law and the SELS.

14th Annual Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference

Once again hosted at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law, Chicago, IL, the 14th annual summer Workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will include distinct--though related--"Main" and "Advanced" workshop sessions.

Main Workshop:  Monday – Friday, July 28-August 1, 2025; Advanced Workshop:  Sunday – Wednesday, August 3-6, 2025.

Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard), Matching and Reweighting Designs for "Pure" Observational Studies: Jens Hainmueller (Stanford), Panel Data and Difference-in-Differences: Jens Hainmueller (Stanford), Regression Discontinuity: Heather Royer (UCSB), and Instrumental Variable Methods: Tymon Sloczynski (Brandeis).

Advanced Workshop Topics/Faculty: Primer on machine learning approaches to prediction: Christian Hansen (Chicago), Applications of machine learning to causal inference:  Christian Hansen (Chicago), Advanced Difference-in Differences: Andrew Goodman-Bacon (Fed. Reserve Bd.), and Advanced Instrumental Variables: Peter Hull (Brown).

In person-registration is limited to 125 participants for each workshop (there will also be a Zoom option as well).

For further information and registration: (click here).

2025 ICPSR Summer Quant. Methods Programs/Workshops

While best known as a leading social science data archive, one of the ICPSR's under-appreciated assets includes its suite of summer programs/workshops. For more than 50 years, the ICPSR has conducted a range (90+) of courses/seminars/workshops, principally based at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus, that spans the arc of quantitative methods as well as a diverse array of social scientific fields. While I recommend in-person programs where possible, online options also exist. Workshop formats vary as well, ranging from 3-5 day courses to 4-week offerings. These offerings can be invaluable for graduate (and undergraduate) students as well as faculty. For those interested, links follow regarding additional registration (click here) and scholarship (click here) information.

George L. Priest (1947-2024)

When my former mentor, Ted Eisenberg (1947-2014), periodically reminded me that "it is difficult to overestimate the influence of selection effects in litigation," his point of reference was a seminal 1984 article, The Selection of Disputes for Litigation. Sadly, one-half of the "Priest-Klein" hypothesis, George L. Priest, the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics at Yale Law School, passed away recently.

Yale Law School's memorial notice echoes what Ted emphasized for decades, "[Priest's] 1984 article (with UCLA economist Benjamin Klein) “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” revolutionized theories of the common law and engendered decades of inquiry regarding the probability of litigation outcomes. The article presented what became known as the ‘Priest-Klein hypothesis’ and introduced the concept of selection bias into legal literature.” Empirical scholars, and many others, mourn Prof. Priest's passing.

Job Opportunity of Note (& ELS' Expanding Footprint)

While my proverbial "gaze" typically fixes on scholarship, "ELS-adjacent" issues periodically catch my eye as well. In this spirit, I recently came across a "real-world" (that is, non-academic) job opportunity that might interest statistics-savvy post-docs (and others). The job posting also implies the possibility that ELS is expanding beyond its traditional academic "silo."

What I learned from the job posting includes that: 1) an "Quantitative Research Unit" operates within (and services) the New Jersey judiciary, and 2) this Unit is actively hiring a "Research Analyst Manager" (click here for a direct link to the job posting). According to the [NJ] Judiciary Research Manager, the Unit is looking to hire "an individual to lead the team doing research across the Civil Court and Family Court practice areas. This is a great opportunity to lead applied work in the Law and Courts arena that has near-immediate impact."

Serial Correlation Testing for Panel Data

When working with panel data, testing for serial correlation is common—if not expected—diagnostic. To this end, a new user-created command (v.1.0.3) – xtdpdserial – functions as a postestimation command for many (though not all) standard commands (e.g., regress, xtreg, etc.).

For those interested, installation download sites include: ssc install xtdpdserial as well as: net install xtdpdserial, from(http://www.kripfganz.de/stata/)

On a distinct, though related, point, Prof. Kripfganz's (Exeter Business School--Econ. Dept.) website includes a very helpful array of related Stata user-commands (click here).

SCOTUS Database--Updates

The Supreme Court Database, motivated in part by Prof. Harold Spaeth (1930-2017), remains a leading source for Court and judicial decisionmaking scholars. Indeed, "virtually all systematic analyses of the contemporary Supreme Court and its members have relied on it." Given the Database's scholarly prominence, I wanted to pass along a few, brief updates.

First, the Database, which includes information (247 variables) on every SCOTUS decision since the "beginning" (1791), has now been updated to include information on all SCOTUS cases through the 2023 Term. Second, the Database's "home" has migrated from Washington University and, starting with the current (Oct. Term 2024), will be archived at Penn State University (click here).

CELS 2024 -- Registration

Registration is now open for 2024 CELS on November 8–9, 2024, at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia. The registration link, hotel information, and program may be found here.

CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. 2024 CELS is co-sponsored by Emory University School of Law and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

From PACER to SCALES: Access to Federal Court Data

Even basic research questions on Art.III courts and federal litigation typically confront consequential barriers to needed data (e.g., federal court records). While the federal government's PACER platform and a few third-party operations provide some relief, both possess their own respective shortcomings and limitations (including, but not limited to, cost).

Initial fruits of a new collaborative effort based at Northwestern University, SCALES, have emerged recently. SCALES is an online platform that seeks to "assemble federal court records, systematically organize them and extract key information, and—most importantly—make them freely available to the public." What exists now includes access to information and records for all federal cases initiated in 2016 and 2017. As SCALES' mission includes "to make court records freely accessible to the public," the platform aspires to, in the future, expand coverage to include "all years."

In a recent paper, The SCALES Project: Making Federal Court Records Free, the authors, David Schwartz (Northwestern) et al., explain the SCALES initiative in greater detail. As well, the project also benefits from its own website (click here).

CELS 2024 -- Call For Papers Deadline Extended

EXTENDED Call For Papers Submission Deadline: Wednesday, July 31, 2024 (11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time).

To submit a paper, please click here. There is no charge for submissions.

Additional CELS 2024 information is found here.

JLEA

Further evidence of a healthy, robust, and growing scholarly field is provided by the emergence of an important new online journal in the ELS space. Co-edited by Christoph Engel (Max Plank Institute), Lee Epstein (USC), Daniel Klerman (USC), and Eyal Zamir (Hebrew) and published by Sage, the Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis (JLEA), a peer-reviewed, open access journal, "aspires to spearhead the empirical turn in law by publishing cutting-edge research that is accessible and of interest to the wider legal community. JLEA aims to attract papers written by social scientists and legal academics alike that have clear legal relevance, that appeal to an international audience, and that combine theory and empirics, whether to draw inferences or to offer rich description."

Information on its inaugural issue can be found here.

CELS 2024 -- Call For Papers

2024 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

NOVEMBER 8-9, 2024

Call for Papers

Emory University School of Law

The 2024 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) is now accepting submissions. CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

The [Extended] Paper Submission Deadline is Wednesday, July 31, 2024 (11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time). There is no charge for submissions.

To submit a paper, please visit the CELS 2024 paper submission website. We encourage preregistration of all experiments, and we encourage all authors to make their data, scripts, and code publicly available upon publication to the extent your methodology permits. We welcome replication studies and papers that develop and demonstrate empirical methods.

Papers are selected through a peer review process. If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions. Accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

About: Emory University School of Law and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 18th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on November 8–9, 2024, in-person, at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, statistics, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions.

CELS 2024--Save the Date (8-9 Nov. 2024)

Co-organizers Tonja Jacobi, Jonathan Nash & Joanna Shepherd are delighted to announce that CELS 2024, hosted by Emory University School of Law, will take place on Fri.-Sat., November 8-9, 2024. A call for papers will follow later this spring.

9th Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference (2024): Call For Proposals

Hosted by BYU Law School in Provo, Utah, and scheduled for October 24-25, 2024, organizers of the 9th Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference invite proposals for individual papers and panels (additional conference info here). Conference organizers welcome proposals on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

• applications of corpus linguistics to constitutional, statutory, contract, patent, trademark, probate, administrative, and criminal law in any state or nation;
• philosophical, normative, and pragmatic commentary on the use of corpus linguistics in the law;
• triangulation between corpus linguistics and other empirical methods in legal interpretation;
• corpus-based analysis of legal discourse or topics; and
• best practices in corpus design and corpus linguistic methods in legal settings.

The deadline for proposals is May 15, 2024. Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 750 words and complete contact information for presenters. Please send proposals to [email protected].

Northwestern University Law Review—7th Annual Empirical Legal Scholarship Issue: Call for Papers

If evidence of empirical legal studies’ growth was not already obvious enough in the peer-reviewed journal world, traditional student-edited law reviews also evidence a turn toward ELS as well. And no more so than perhaps the Northwestern University Law Review which is pleased to announce its 7th annual issue dedicated to empirical legal scholarship, to be published in March 2025. According to the student editors, they seek "to bring cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, empirical work to our legal audience, and enrich our understanding of the law, legal actors, and legal doctrine through robust and reliable examination of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method data." To access to past NULR empirical issues click here.

The exclusive submission window for the Volume 119 Empirical Issue of the Northwestern University Law Review will open on March 18, 2024, and run until April 30, 2024. A subset of submissions will be selected to move forward to peer review. The Law Review will make every effort to notify authors of rejection or of advancement to peer review by mid-July 2024. Final publication decisions will be issued by mid-August 2024, with the publication date set in March 2025.

Submissions must be between 15,000 and 30,000, and conform generally to the style and formatting expectations that are common to law reviews. For more information, please visit our website: Empirical Issue - Northwestern University Law Review (northwesternlawreview.org) or reach out to Alisher Juzgenbayev, Senior Empirical Editor for the Northwestern University Law Review at [email protected].

2024 Northwestern Main and Advanced Causal Inference Workshops

Co-organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Scott Cunningham (Baylor—econ), the 13th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will be held at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL.

Main Workshop: Monday – Friday, July 29--August 2, 2024; Advanced Workshop: Sunday -- Wednesday, August 4-7, 2024.

Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard Univ.); Matching and Reweighting Designs for “Pure” Observational Studies (Brigham Frandsen, BYU); Panel Data and Difference-in-Differences (Yiqing Xu, Stanford); Instrumental variable methods (Eric French, Cambridge); and Regression Discontinuity (Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare, UC Santa Barbara).

Advanced Workshop Topics/Faculty: Primer on machine learning approaches to prediction and Applications of machine learning to causal inference (Christian Hansen, Chicago); Advanced Difference-in Differences (Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Federal Reserve Board); and Advanced Instrumental Variables (Peter Hull, Brown).

For further information and registration: (click here).

2024 AsLEA Annual Confernece -- Call For Papers

Guide by the conference's theme: "The Era of AI and Sustainability: Opportunity and Challenge for Law and Economics," the AsLEA invites article manuscripts or abstracts or session proposals by March 31, 2024, for consideration. The conference, hosted at the National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), will include keynote addresses by Adam Chilton (Chicago) and Scott Baker (Wash U). For more (and updated) information click here; email inquiries to: [email protected].

SELS Global: Brazil 2024 -- Call for Papers Deadline Reminder

SELS Global Conference, Brazil 2024

São Paulo - June 5-7, 2024

Call for Papers -- Regular Paper Deadline: 31 January 2024

The 2024 SELS Global Conference on Empirical Legal Studies [Brazil] is now accepting submissions. Organizers will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

The Early Paper Submission Deadline is Thursday, December 28, 2023 (11:59 PM UTC-3:00), with decisions on January 3, 2024. The Regular Paper Submission will be opened from 29 December, 2023 until 31 January, 2024 (11:59 PM UTC-3:00), with decisions on February 23, 2024. There is no charge for submissions. Papers not chosen in the early review will be automatically directed for further evaluation in the Regular Submission round.

Papers are selected through a peer review process. If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions. Accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

To submit a paper, please click here. Questions for conference organizers should be directed to: [email protected].

About: The Centro de Estudos da Ordem Econômica (CEOE) and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) Global Brazil on June 5-7, 2024, in person at the CEOE building (Federal University of São Paulo, Quitaúna Campus, São Paulo). CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions.

ADDENDUM: Please note that SELS Global Brazil - Brazil 2024 is part of the growing SELS international conference program and not a replacement for the annual CELS conference series. The 18th annual CELS conference will be held at Emory University School of Law in the fall of 2024. More information on the 2024 Emory CELS will be sent in the new year.

SELS Global: CELS Brazil 2024 -- Call for Papers

CELS Global Conference, Brazil 2024

São Paulo - June 5-7, 2024

Call for Papers

The 2024 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) [Brazil] is now accepting submissions. CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

The Early Paper Submission Deadline is Thursday, December 28, 2023 (11:59 PM UTC-3:00), with decisions on January 3, 2024. The Regular Paper Submission will be opened from 29 December, 2023 until 31 January, 2024 (11:59 PM UTC-3:00), with decisions on February 23, 2024. There is no charge for submissions. Papers not chosen in the early review will be automatically directed for further evaluation in the Regular Submission round.

Papers are selected through a peer review process. If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions. Accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

To submit a paper, please click here. Questions for conference organizers should be directed to: [email protected].

About: The Centro de Estudos da Ordem Econômica (CEOE) and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) Global Brazil on June 5-7, 2024, in person at the CEOE building (Federal University of São Paulo, Quitaúna Campus, São Paulo). CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions.

ADDENDUM: Please note that SELS Global Brazil - CELS Brazil 2024 is part of the growing SELS international conference program and not a replacement for the annual CELS conference series. The 18th annual CELS conference will be held at Emory University School of Law in the fall of 2024. More information on the 2024 Emory CELS will be sent in the new year.

CELS 2023 -- Schedule/Program

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 13-14, 2023

Schedule/Program

University of Chicago Law School

The program (overview version) for the 17th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS 2023) is now available (click here).

Access to the detailed schedule, however, is password protected, as it will be the source for accessing the conference papers. It is available to all registered participants in the conference (click here).

CELS 2023 -- Conference Registration

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 13-14, 2023

Conference Registration

University of Chicago Law School

The University of Chicago Law School and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to invite you to CELS 2023. The conference will take place October 13–14, 2023, at the University of Chicago’s flagship conference facility, the David Rubenstein Forum. CELS 2023 will feature more than 40 panels, a poster session, and a plenary session on the future of machine learning and AI in empirical legal studies.

As well, on October 12, 2023, UChicago Law and SELS will host a pre-conference workshop on empirical methods: “How to Use Machine Learning and AI in Empirical Legal Research.” This hands-on workshop will feature leading scholars in the field and will introduce participants to tools and techniques for ML- and AI-assisted empirical research.

CELS 2023 Registration: Please visit the CELS 2023 conference website (click here) for more information and to register.

Please direct any conference questions to the conference organizers at: [email protected].

CELS 2023--Submission Deadline Extended

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 13-14, 2023

Call for Papers -- Submission Deadline Extension

University of Chicago Law School

The deadline for submitting papers to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) has been extended. The new deadline is Sunday, July 9, 2023 (11:59 PM Central Daylight Time).

Please note that this is the final deadline. The Conference website will not accept submissions after 11:59 PM (CDT) on Sunday, July 9, 2023.

To submit a paper, please visit the CELS 2023 website. We encourage preregistration of all experiments, and we encourage all authors to make their data, scripts, and code publicly available upon publication to the extent your methodology permits. We welcome replication studies and papers that develop and demonstrate empirical methods.

About: The University of Chicago Law School and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 17th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on October 13–14, 2023, in person at the University of Chicago. CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. Visit the conference website.

Questions about the submissions process should be directed to the conference organizers at: [email protected].

CELS 2023 -- Call for Papers

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 13-14, 2023

Call for Papers

University of Chicago Law School

The 2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) is now accepting submissions. CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).

The Paper Submission Deadline is Thursday, June 29, 2023 (11:59 PM Central Daylight Time). There is no charge for submissions.

To submit a paper, please visit the CELS 2023 website We encourage preregistration of all experiments, and we encourage all authors to make their data, scripts, and code publicly available upon publication to the extent your methodology permits. We welcome replication studies and papers that develop and demonstrate empirical methods.

Papers are selected through a peer review process. If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions. Accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

About: The University of Chicago Law School and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 17th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on October 13–14, 2023, in person at the University of Chicago. CELS is an interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. To visit the conference website, click here.

If you have questions about the submissions process, please contact the conference organizers at [email protected].

2023 Northwestern Main and Advanced Causal Inference Workshops

Co-organized by Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Scott Cunningham (Baylor—econ), the 12th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will be held at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL.

Main Workshop:  Monday – Friday, August 7-11, 2023; Advanced Workshop:  Monday – Thursday (midday), August 14-17, 2023; and Optional Machine Learning Primer:  Sunday afternoon, August 13, 2023.

Main Workshop Topics/Faculty: Introduction to Modern Methods for Causal Inference:  Donald B. Rubin (Harvard Univ.), Matching and Reweighting Designs and Difference-in-Differences: Jens Hainmueller (Stanford Univ.), Regression Discontinuity:  Matias Cattaneo (Princeton Univ.), and Instrumental variables:  Rocio Titiunik (Princeton Univ.).

Advanced Workshop Topics/Faculty: Applications of machine learning to causal inference:  Christian Hansen (Univ. Chicago), Advanced matching and balancing methods: Jeffrey Wooldridge (Michigan State Univ.), Advanced panel data methods:  Yiqing Xu (Stanford Univ.), and Empirical Bayes Methods:  Christopher Walters (UC Berkeley).

In person-registration is limited to 125 participants for each workshop. There will also be a Zoom option, but please come in person if you can.  The online experience is not the same.

For further information and registration: (click here)

CELS 2023--Save the Date

2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

Save the Date

October 13-14, 2023

The University of Chicago Law School

David Rubenstein Forum
1201 E 60th St
Chicago, IL 60637

19th Asian Law and Economics Association (AsLEA) Annual Meeting -- Call for Papers

The conference's central theme is "Rationality, Norms, and the Law." The in-person conference, scheduled for 8-9 August 2023, at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, invites papers regarding the economic analysis of laws and institutions or the relationship between rationality and norms in the legal system.

Professor Kaushik Basu (Department of Economics and SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University) and Professor Todd Zywicki (Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University) are the keynote speakers of the 2023 AsLEA Conference.

Please submit the manuscripts or abstracts of your article or a session proposal, with a short bio in PDF or Word to [email protected] by May 31, 2023. We will make early decisions on a rolling basis and inform applicants of the results as soon as possible. There are no submission or registration fees for the 2023 AsLEA Conference. For hotel information click here.

Please visit the Asian Law and Economics Association website (click here) for updated information. If you have any questions, please send an e-mail to [email protected] or contact the local organizer. Note that Participants should take care of booking hotels and arranging travels by themselves. Neither AsLEA nor the local organizer is able to provide stipends or reimburse expenses of participants.

Local Organizer: Tze-Shiou Chien (Deputy Director & Research Professor, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica; Vice President, AsLEA. [email protected]).

Call for Papers: 7th Annual Penn-NYU Empirical Contracts Workshop

As hints of our "pre-COVID" lives begin to emerge, including in-person conferences, I am delighted to pass along the following call for papers from a long-time ELS-blog reader:

The 7th Annual Penn-NYU Empirical Contracts Workshop is scheduled to place in-person at the New York University School of Law on 23 May 2023.

The Workshop is a forum for the presentation and discussion of early and mid-stage projects analyzing contract law and practice from a variety of empirical perspectives. Papers are selected through a peer review process.  Attendees of the conference are expected to cover their own travel and lodging costs, but there are no conference fees.

Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference). If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Please note that accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

Please note that the Workshop paper submission deadline is 1 March 2023.

Organizing committee:  Dave Hoffman (Penn); Florencia Marotta-Wurgler (NYU) and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (Penn).  Please email submissions to: [email protected]   

CELS 2023--Univ. of Chicago Law School

Coming on the heels of an exceptionally well-executed and successful CELS at Virginia, CELS 2023 co-organizers--Adam Chilton, Dhammika Dharmapala, and William Hubbard--announced that CELS 2023 is scheduled for 13-14 October 2023, at the University of Chicago Law School. More information will follow.

4th annual Association for Interdisciplinary Metaresearch and Open Science Conference (AIMOS2022) -- Registration

At the request of an ELS colleague, I want to help circulate the following registration information for the 4th annual Association for Interdisciplinary Metaresearch and Open Science Conference (AIMOS2022). Please note that the conference is scheduled for November 28-30, 2022, at the University of Melbourne. AIMOS2022 will be an in-person conference, with support to attend virtually.

As an association, AIMOS aims to make the research process more trustworthy and efficient and to promote the study of how research is done and how it can be improved.

The conference program will also explore other areas of metaresearch including a host of mini-note sessions on:

• Big Team Science
• Credible Science for Decision Making
• Correcting the Scientific Record
• History of Metascience 
• Unpacking Trust in Science
• The Many-Analysts EcoEvo Project
• The Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) Program.

In addition to invited speaker sessions, submissions are now open for: discussions about norms, practices, and cultures with science and scholarship more broadly; learning and development through practical skills workshops in open science (e.g., R, lab notebooks, pre-registration); and getting things done in hackathons.

Finally, a small number of AU$1,000 travel grants are also available to support in-person attendance.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Tables (in Stata)

Throughout the second-half of 2021, the Stata Blog ran a 7-part series on generating various tables. A single link to the 7-part series is here.

CELS -- UVA -- 2022: Papers -- Deadline Extended

EXTENDED Paper Submission Deadline: Sunday, July 10, 2022 (11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time).

To submit a paper, please go to the CELS UVA 2022 website (click here; submissions tab, click here). There is no charge for submissions.

Hotels: It is likely to be a crowded weekend in Charlottesville, so please be sure to reserve your hotel early by following the Hotels tab on the conference website.

About: The University of Virginia School of Law and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to host the 16th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on November 4-5, 2022, in person at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. CELS is a highly regarded interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, policy analysis, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. Papers are selected through a peer review process, and discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions.

Scope: CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference). If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Please note that accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

Keynote: We are thrilled to announce that the keynote Friday dinner speaker will be Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and former Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. There is a separate charge for attendance to this dinner event.

If you have questions about the submissions process, please contact the conference organizers at [email protected].

Save The Dates--16th Annual CELS (In-Person)

 

 

The Society for Empirical Legal Studies’

16th Annual Meeting

will be held on

November 4th and 5th, 2022 (Friday and Saturday) at the

University of Virginia School of Law

More information here (https://www.cels2022.com/)

A call for papers will be coming soon, but please mark your calendars now.

ABF Fellowship

A long-time Els blog reader, Elizabeth Mertz (Wisc./ABF), asked me to pass along the following information about an ABF Fellowship opportunity (sponsored jointly with AccessLex Institute). I am happy to do so.

"We are writing to spread the word about a special opportunity at the American Bar Foundation, offered jointly with the AccessLex Institute.  We have funding for a researcher who is currently a candidate for an LLM, SJD, or PhD -- and who is doing empirical, interdisciplinary research on legal education or on legal aspects of higher education.  The baseline funding is for a fellowship of $35,000 a year, extendable up to 2 years, to be held in residence at the ABF in Chicago.  (Additional funding for relocation to Chicago, and for research and travel to conferences is available as well.) Please circulate this to any colleagues who might be interested -- or who might have students who could apply."

Anyone interested in further information should directly contact: Jothie Rajah ([email protected]), Laura Beth Nielsen ([email protected]), or Elizabeth Mertz ([email protected]).

CELS 2022--Toronto: Registration and More Information

Registration and related logistical information follow for the 15th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (online), 18-19 March 2022, organized by the Univ. Toronto Faculty of Law:

Registration: We invite you to register for CELS using the link (click here). Given that the conference is remote, the registration fees $50 for faculty and $20 for students. We ask that you kindly register at your earliest convenience. For participants, we ask that you register by March 13, 2022.

Keynote Speaker: This year's keynote speaker will be Prof. David Card, the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2021, Prof. Card was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. A native of Guelph, Ontario, Prof. Card keynote talk is titled, ""Affirmative Action for Racial and Gender Diversity." The talk will take place on Friday, March 18, 2022 from 12:30pm - 1:30pm EST.

Training: We will be using the VVC conference platform. To avoid technical snafus on the day of the conference, VVC will be providing participants with an opportunity to try out the platform in advance of the conference. The training session will be on Wednesday, March 16, 2022, at 1pm. We specifically ask that the chair for each session (i.e., see below) join. We will circulate a link in the upcoming days.

Presentation Length: Each paper is scheduled for 30 minutes. That 30 minutes will be divided into three parts: 15 minutes for the presenter’s presentation, 8 minutes for the discussant’s discussion, and 7 minutes for general Q&A.

We ask presenters and discussants to respect these times to the best of their ability. The Chair of each session (described below) will be asked to keep time, but it is the responsibility of each speaker to abide by the time limits.

Session Chairs:The presenter of the last paper in each session is the Chair of that session, as designated by an asterisk on the program. The Chair’s only responsibility is timekeeping.

For additional conference information (click here).

CELS (Toronto)--Some Very Good News and Some Sub-Optimal News

I begin with the good news: CELS (Toronto), scheduled for March 18-19, 2022, will go forward. The sub-optimal wrinkle, however, is that organizers were forced to move the event to an on-line (remote) platform and format. As the organizers note: "Unfortunately, the surge in Omicron has led to travel restrictions into Canada, as well as restrictions on gatherings in the province of Ontario. Events at the University of Toronto are not permitted. It is likely that many of these restrictions will still be in force in March."

For more information about the conference click here.

CELS "2020" -- Call For Papers Extension [New Deadline: 31 October 2021]

As previously mentioned (here and here), CELS "2020," re-scheduled for March 18-19, 2022, still plans on an in-person conference at the University of Toronto (Canada). At the same time, however, conference organizers note that: "We are of course monitoring the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Delta variant. At this point we are hopeful the conference will proceed as planned. But if the Society For Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) deems it necessary to change plans, we will let you know as soon as possible."

To better accommodate the various disruptions incident to the pandemic, the conference organizers have extended the Call for Papers deadline to October 31, 2021.

Click here for additional conference information.

To submit a paper, please click here.

US News Law School Rankings and "Scholarly Impact" Metrics: An Update

A loyal Els Blog reader passed along the following and asked that I share it. I am delighted to do so.

A while back the US News and World Report reported that it was contemplating a new metric designed to measure “scholarly impact” incident to its infamous annual law school rankings. Needless to say, given law schools’ focus on annual rankings US News’ contemplated change to its ranking formula generated considerable blow-back (from many different directions). The Law & Society Association, for example, worried that a scholarly impact measure drawing from the Hein database would have deleterious impacts on interdisciplinary scholars.

In the end (and for now, at least), the US News and World Report elected not to proceed with its proposed new scholarly impact metric. A statement from the Law & Society Association (here) nicely describes its concerns and expresses relief at US News’ recent decision.

The Federal Circuit Dataset project (v.3)

While Jason Rantanen's (Iowa) third update to The Federal Circuit Dataset Project will certainly interest empirical IP scholars, the Project's broader implications speak to empirical law scholars in all fields.

The third edition advances the existing Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions in at least two main ways. First, the dataset now includes document numbers for all archived documents. Second, the dataset now facilitates increased understanding about what happens to appeals, including information about appeal pendency and origin.

Setting aside the dataset's utility to empirical IP scholars, the Project itself reflects a growing commitment to the hard and often under-rewarded work of dataset creation as well as an impulse to make such data (and related codebooks, etc.) publicly-available. Such impulses need to be rewarded, promoted, and nurtured. The paper's abstract follows.

"This paper introduces the third generation of the Federal Circuit Dataset Project. The third generation builds on the existing Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions with the following enhancements:

• The addition of a dataset of all dockets for the Federal Circuit since 2000. These dockets are linked to the documents in the Compendium through the Appeal_Dockets field in both datasets.
• New fields containing additional information about Federal Circuit decisions.
• More complete data in existing fields that require manual coding.
• Parallel archiving of the document and docket datasets on the Dataverse.

In addition to describing the third generation of the Federal Circuit Dataset Project, this paper also provides updated descriptive statistics about Federal Circuit decisions and new statistics on appeal dockets."

An Updated Database of State Tort Law Reforms (7th)

Ronen Avraham (Tel Aviv Univ./Texas) recently alerted me to an update of one of the more helpful resources around for those who study torts and tort reform. Specifically, the Database of State Tort Law Reforms (7.0), seeks to create "one 'canonized' dataset will increase our understanding of tort reform’s impacts on our lives." A fuller (though excerpted) description follows.

"This This manuscript of the DSTLR (7th) updates the DSTLR (6th) and contains the most detailed, complete and comprehensive legal dataset of the most prevalent tort reforms in the United States between 1980 and 2020.... The dataset records state laws in all fifty states and the District of Columbia over the last several decades. For each reform we record the effective date, a short description of the reform, whether or not the jury is allowed to know about the reform, whether the reform was upheld or struck down by the states’ courts, as well as whether it was amended by the state legislator. "

Data Resources Courtesy of the APSA Law & Courts Section

Our good friends and political science colleagues over at the APSA's Law & Courts Section recently updated the Section's website (click here). What is especially helpful is a sub-page (here) that provides links to the leading court data sets (SCOTUS, CA, district courts, as well as state supreme courts) along with related data assets (e.g., Martin-Quinn Scores, Judicial Common Space Scores).

Matthew McCubbins (1956-2021)

It is with sadness that I note the passing of a friend and colleague Matthew McCubbins.

Bridge Ideal Points--2021 Update

Michael Bailey (Georgetown--Govt.) has updated the Bridge Ideal Points estimates (click here) to cover years 1950 through 2020. These Ideal point estimates include the Supreme Court, presidential, and congressional ideology estimates and are designed to facilitate inter-institutional and cross-temporal comparisons.

While the Bridge Ideal Points compete somewhat with the Martin-Quinn scores in the literature, the two sets of ideology estimates correlate reasonably highly with one another. Despite the overlap, these two ideology estimates differ in two important ways.First, "Bridge Ideal Points are designed to be intertemporally comparable. Martin and Quinn scores assume the ideological cutpoints of Supreme Court cases are drawn from a common distribution across years, which makes them less comparable across time when the case load changes." Second, while Martin and Quinn scores only cover the Supreme Court justices, Bridge Ideal Points for justices are comparable to Bridge Ideal Points for presidents and members of Congress as well.

Regardless of one's preference, efforts to estimate justice ideology remain a staple in the judicial decisionmaking literature.

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society ("JPTOS")--Call For Submissions

The Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society ("JPTOS"), a leading intellectual property law journal for over one hundred years, has recently returned from a publishing hiatus due to the pandemic and is eager to accept new article submissions. Moreover, the Journal’s incoming EIC, Timothy Hsieh (Okla City), a long-time ELS Blog reader, expressly noted that the Journal publishes “a fair amount of articles involving empirical analysis.”

JPTOS seeks articles involving intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, or hybrids between all such forms) or law & technology (blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, social media, privacy/surveillance, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, COVID vaccine patents or patent policy and topics) and all related fields. JPTOS is one of the oldest intellectual property journals in the United States and for over a century has been at the forefront of various intellectual property debates.

Submissions may be directly emailed to: [email protected] (or to the Journal’s Scholastica location: https://jptos.scholasticahq.com/). Additional details regarding submission guidelines can be found at the Journal’s official website (http://jptos.org).

15th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS)

Given the many disruptions incident to the COVID-19 pandemic, I am nothing short of delighted to announce that the Fifteenth Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS), presented by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) and hosted by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (Canada), is now scheduled for Friday, March 18, and Saturday, March 19, 2022.

CELS brings together scholars from an array of fields, including law, economics, political science, psychology, statistics, sociology, history, and policy analysis. Papers are selected through a peer-review process and each is assigned an individual discussant. CELS invites empirical papers that span all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed paper drafts that include main results. Submitted papers must also be unpublished (and are expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference). The paper submission portal will open August 1, 2021. The deadline for submissions is October 17, 2021.

Of course, while the conference organizers plan on (and sincerely hope for) an in-person event, given the ongoing uncertainties participants are urged to delay purchasing any non-refundable airline tickets at this moment. Additional conference information is found here.

"Results-to-Table" in Stata

While Stata--to my mind, anyway--still has not "fixed" the "unnecessary" degree of complexity in its graphics capabilities, it's nice to see it attend to the critical and often-challenging "results-to-table" migration task in v.17. While some may simply "hand-transcribe" results from the computer screen onto a table created for or embedded into Word documents, the more adventurous likely play with various "outreg" and related commands (e.g., "outreg2"). Stata has recently turned its attention to an alternative (or complementary) approach with updated commands that facilitate users "customizing" table presentations derived from various results. Unlike most efforts thus far, coding for this approach is "native" to Stata. Again, while I'm not entirely sure whether Stata has, once again, made the process unduly complicated, for anyone interested an introductory (and explanatory) video is here.

More Stata Plotting Options

The newly-released subsetplot command produces an array of scatter or other twoway plots for sub-groups of data. As Nick Cox observes (here): "We all know that if you want to compare relationships graphically between groups of observations, we can superimpose different groups in a single plot, or juxtapose different groups in several plots. This [the subsetplot command] is a hybrid approach combining elements of those two strategies."

To illustrate, consider the following plot of auto weight by MPG:The subsetplot command plots these same data across a selected sub-grouping's outcomes (below, by auto repair record groupings (1-5)):For those interested, to download the [Stata] command type:

ssc install subsetplot

6th Annual TAU Workshop for Junior Scholars--Call For Papers (and Optimism)

With the shared hope that some semblance of "healthy normalcy" will return to all sometime soon, I pass along the following Call For Papers.

The Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law is pleased to invite submissions to its sixth junior legal scholar workshop. The workshop provides junior scholars with the opportunity to present and discuss their work, receive meaningful feedback from faculty members and peers, and actively participate in an international community of junior legal scholars.

"The upcoming 2021 TAU workshop for junior scholars in law, which will be held in Tel-Aviv University Law School on November 14-16, 2021, will be dedicated to 'Legal Change in Revolutionary Times.' We are seeking cutting-edge works in progress, in varied legal fields and written from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, that investigate the role of law in revolutionary times, and we welcome works that broadly relate to the core themes of the workshop."

Conference organizers expressly welcomes proposals from: "doctoral candidates, and recent graduates of doctoral programs submissions. Participants from the global South and under-represented communities are particularly encouraged to apply." Paper proposals are due to conference organizers by June 1, 2021. More conference specific information can be found (here); those wishing to contact conference organizers directly can send an email to: [email protected]

Finally, conference organizers have adopted an "optimistic" assumption and, at present, anticipate a traditional, "in-person" conference. They also note, however, that if "Covid-19 is till ruling our lives by November 2021," the conference workshop format will transform into a "hybrid-virtual."

Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize -- Update

Each year, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) awards the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Prize for the best poster presented at the Conference. Inasmuch as last year’s Conference was postponed due to the pandemic, this year the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies will award the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize to the best paper submitted to JELS in 2021 and accepted for publication. The prize will be judged by the JELS editors. To honor our late colleague’s strong and enduring interest in mentoring and developing new empirical scholars, we will heavily favor submissions by early-career scholars in making this assessment. We will automatically consider any paper submitted between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021, as eligible for consideration. The award will be noted in the volume in which the article is published and an announcement sent to the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

Another Neat Stata Output "Trick"

A long-time ELS Blog reader, Jeff Yates (SUNY-Binghamton), alerted me to another under-appreciated command that can make life a bit easier for those needing/desiring to convert Stata results into Word docs.  asdoc is a Stata program that makes it easy to send output from Stata to MS Word by creating publication-ready tables from such Stata commands as summarize, correlate, tabstat, cross-tabs, regressions, t-tests, flexible table, as well as others. More information can be found here. To access (or update) the command:

ssc install asdoc, update