Empirical legal studies (ELS) is an approach to the study of

law Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vari ...

legal procedure Procedural law, adjective law, in some jurisdictions referred to as remedial law, or rules of court, comprises the rules by which a court hears and determines what happens in civil, lawsuit, criminal or administrative proceedings. The rules are ...

, and

legal theory Jurisprudence, or legal theory, is the theoretical study of the propriety of law. Scholars of jurisprudence seek to explain the nature of law in its most general form and they also seek to achieve a deeper understanding of legal reasoning ...

through the use of

empirical Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and ...

research. Empirical legal researchers use research techniques that are typical of

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analy ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

, and

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and ...

; however, ELS research tends to be more focused on purely legal questions than the related fields of

law and economics Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law, which emerged primarily from scholars of the Chicago school of economics. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of la ...

legal psychology Together, legal psychology and forensic psychology form the field more generally recognized as "psychology and law". Following earlier efforts by psychologists to address legal issues, psychology and law became a field of study in the 1960s as p ...

, and

sociology of law The sociology of law (legal sociology, or law and society) is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology ...

. ELS also tends to be more narrowly quantitative than fields such as law-and-society or new legal realism (NLR), which embrace

qualitative Qualitative descriptions or distinctions are based on some quality or characteristic rather than on some quantity or measured value. Qualitative may also refer to: *Qualitative property, a property that can be observed but not measured numericall ...

and

quantitative Quantitative may refer to: * Quantitative research, scientific investigation of quantitative properties * Quantitative analysis (disambiguation) * Quantitative verse, a metrical system in poetry * Statistics, also known as quantitative analysis ...

social science methods, as well as mixed method approaches. In 2004, the ''

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies The ''Journal of Empirical Legal Studies'' is a peer-edited and peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes empirically-oriented research on a wide range of legal topics, including civil justice, civil procedure, corporate law, administrative law ...

'' was launched by the

Society for Empirical Legal Studies A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societ ...

and

Cornell Law School Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. One of the five Ivy League law schools, it offers four law degree programs, JD, LLM, MSLS and JSD, along with several dual-deg ...

, and within three years rose to be ranked 28th of the over 800 US law journals.Law Journals: Submission and Ranking
Ranking of US Law journals by impact factor, 2007

References

External links

Journal of Empirical Legal StudiesEmpirical Legal Studies Blog - A semi-official blog of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies
Legal education {{law-stub