2026 Brazil Global Conference on Empirical Legal Studies -- Submission Deadline Extended

Ivan Ribeiro (UNIFESP--São Paulo, BR) reminded me that the Call For Papers submission deadline was extended until Mon., March 9. Information about the conference for those considering submitting follows.

2026 Brazil Global Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

CELS Global Brazil will be held June 8–10, 2026, in person in São Paulo (with possible satellite events on adjacent days). 

Call for Papers (Deadline Extended Until Mon., March 9, 2026)

The Centro de Estudos da Ordem Econômica at the Federal University of São Paulo (CEOE/Unifesp), Insper, the University of São Paulo Law School, Associacãço Cearense de Estudos e Pesquisas, Instituto CELS Latinoamérica, and the Society for the Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to announce that the 2026 Brazil Global Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS Global Brazil 2026) is now accepting submissions.

                                                                                             

Submissions

CELS Global Brazil welcomes empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. The 2026 conference will be held jointly with the VI Brazilian Conference on Law and Public Policy, allowing for expanded coverage to include law and policy subjects as well.

Authors are encouraged to submit works in progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results.

Submitted papers must be unpublished and are expected to remain unpublished at the time of the conference.

Key Dates

Submission Deadline: Monday, March 9, 2026 (11:59 PM UTC−3:00).

Decisions Announced: Monday, March 30, 2026.

How to Submit

To submit a paper, visit: https://celsbrazil.org.br/

 

For questions about the submission process, please contact the conference organizers at: infor@celsbrazil.org.br

Data on SCOTUS Advocates

As the Supreme Court's docket continues to contract over time, the number of certiorarari grants that yield merits decisions likewise declines. This decline, in turn, reduces the number of attorneys that argue in the Supreme Court. In recent years, Court observers have noted that a small number of "elite" attorneys have essentially "captured" the Court. Specifically, even though, in total, only approximately 1 percent of all cert petitions are taken by the Court, an exceptionally small group of elite lawyers participate in almost 50 percent of the cases granted certiorarari.

In a recent paper, The Inside Track, Tracey George (Vanderbilt) et al., subject this "elitification" claim to data. The paper's data set draws from two main sources. The first is the Court itself, whose official website (supremecourt.gov) lists all certiorari petitions from 2001 to the present. The second source draws from Oyez, an archive of the U.S. Supreme Court curated by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. The Oyez data identify the lawyers who before the Court.

The data emphasize a few key points. One (implied by Figure 1, below) is that a very small number of lawyers from the most elite law firms dominate this space. A second, and more surprising, finding is that "law school clinics are the next most dominant players at the Court."

The paper's abstract follows.

"Roughly 1% of all petitions to be heard are taken by the Supreme Court each year; 5%, if one looks only at paid petitions. Getting certiorarari, in other words, is highly competitive. But little is known about the lawyers who, year in and year out, dominate the competition for cert. In this Essay, we unpack twenty-five years of data on petitions and the lawyers who bring them. Who are the superstars of the cert process and where do they come from?”