The New Legal Realism Project, jointly sponsored by the UW Law School's Institute for Legal Studies and the American Bar Foundation, held its first conference June 25-27, 2004 in Madison. The event brought together approximately 40 scholars from institutions nationwide who seek to develop an interdisciplinary paradigm for empirical research on law. The new paradigm will focus on the effects of law "from the bottom up": examining the effects of law on people's everyday lives.

Conference attendees commented after the successful weekend of panels and informal discussions that it was appropriate for the gathering  to take place in Madison under the auspices of the University of Wisconsin Law School, where the law-in-action approach to legal studies has been a tradition since the early 1900s.

The conference was conceived by University of Wisconsin Law School professor Elizabeth Mertz. Co-convenors were professors Jane Larson and Victoria Nourse, and other Wisconsin faculty on the program were Howard Erlanger, Marc Galanter, Stewart Macaulay, Arthur McEvoy, Thomas Mitchell, John Ohnesorge, Boa Santos, David Trubek and Louise Trubek. Conference organizer was Pam Hollenhorst.

Conference originators stated in their overview, "We seek to develop a tripartite approach that includes sophisticated consideration of legal issues, empirical research, and policy ? much as did the old legal realists, but with the benefit of several generations of new thinking in all of these areas."

Submitted by on July 2, 2004

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