Empirical Legal Studies

Eisenberg’s scholarship upended conventional wisdom that these cases were unduly clogging courts. Eisenberg was foremost among a growing cadre of legal scholars to exploit sophisticated statistical tools to systematically explore a wide array of legal issues. Since then, and propelled by Eisenberg’s pioneering scholarship, Cornell emerged as a leading center for empirical legal studies–a field that has altered the ways in which scholars, judges, litigants, and policy-makers think about and approach many legal issues. The launch of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies in the early 2000s, edited at Cornell Law School and a leading journal in the field, cemented Cornell Law School’s status as a hub for what is now an important intellectual movement embraced by a growing number of scholars around the world. A cadre of Cornell law school faculty, often in collaboration with colleagues from a diverse array of social science disciplines, are widely acknowledged as among the most influential scholars in the empirical legal studies field.