Empirical Legal Studies

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 Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference).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]   

The Two-Part Metascience 2023 Confernece(s)

At the request of a loyal Elsblog reader--who is also helping organize the Metascience 2023 conference--I pass along the following.

Metascience is an organization that promotes "global gathering for knowledge sharing, community building, and opportunities to define a roadmap of research and intervention priorities to accelerate science." To this end, "Metascience 2023" involves two separate--though related--conference components. The in-person component is scheduled for 9-10 May 2023, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC (USA). The organizing group is also mounting a free virtual component, set for "late April and early May," 2023.

For anyone interested in additional information, click here for general conference information, and here for the conferences' call for papers/proposals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."