CELS 2026: Call For Papers

 

Call for Papers

Conference on Empirical Legal Studies

October 2-3, 2026

 

The 2026 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS), co-sponsored by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, 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 Submitted papers must be unpublished and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference.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 June 12, 2026 (11:59 PM Central Daylight Time). There is no charge for submissions.

 

To submit a paper, please visit here. 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. Authors of accepted papers should expect to serve as a commentator on another paper in the conference.

Additional conference information is available here.

Experimental Evidence Related to Diversity Jurisdiction's Assumptions

While first-year law students are taught that the most common justification for federal diversity jurisdiction involves concerns about potential bias against out-of-state litigants in state courts, empirical attention to whether these bias concerns are warranted is comparatively underdeveloped.

In Diversity Jurisdiction and Out-of-State Bias: Experimental Evidence, Daniel Klerman (USC) and Jonathan Nash (Emory) report results from experiments designed to detect out-of-state bias. What they find, at bottom, is that their results do not “provide uniformly solid evidence for the existence of bias or of federal courts (at least as they are currently constituted) reducing that bias through the policing of lawyer appeals to bias.” The paper's abstract follows.

In Memoriam: Marc Galanter (1931-2026)

It is with sadness that I note the recent passing of Prof. Marc Galanter (Wisc.). As Brian Leiter observes (here), Professor Galanter's scholarly influence runs exceptionally deep. Marc, emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he had taught since the late 1970s, is wide recognized as "one of the most important figures in law & society scholarship over the past half-century." Colleagues at Wisconsin note that Marc's scholarly focus engages with, in part, "how the legal system, in the U.S. and elsewhere, actually functions in practice. While there are many people who embody our Law in Action tradition, it’s hard to think of a better exemplar." Finally, as a co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS), I note that Marc's canonical contribution to volume 1:3 (2004), The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts, endures as one of JELS' most cited papers.

Data on Plea Offers & Implications for the "Trial Penalty" Hypothesis

While plea offers (and acceptances) are ubiquitous in our criminal justice system, empirical research on the plea bargaining process remains sparse. A recent paper by David Abrams (Penn.) et al., A (Plea) Offer You Can Refuse, sheds interesting and important new empirical light on a practice largely shrouded in secrecy.

The data encompass information on initial plea offers made for felonies between 2012 and 2017 in Philadelphia, and include initial plea offers for 87.4% of cases. These plea data are supplemented by additional data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts as well as the Philadelphia Police Dept. The paper draws defendant-case level data from Philadelphia largely because, as the authors note, "it is the only large jurisdiction that has shared information on all plea offers – both those that are accepted and rejected – for a large number of cases." These data are pressed into the service of exploring the prevailing wisdom regarding the imposition of a "trial penalty" on defendants who reject plea offers.

The paper's core finding, implied in Figure 3 (below), surprises: "We find that initial plea offers are significantly longer than sentences for cases not immediately resolved through a plea, even when a person is later convicted at trial."

Figure 3. Plea offer and sentence length by method of case resolution, where defendant is guilty