University of Wisconsin Law School professors Stewart Macaulay and Beth Mertz joined Robert Nelson, the Director of the American Bar Foundation, as guest bloggers on the Empirical Legal Studies Blog for the week of June 19, 2006.  The blog can be found at www.elsblog.org.

Their topic is the New Legal Realism (NLR) Project, jointly sponsored by the Law School's Institute for Legal Studies and the American Bar Foundation, both renowned centers with long histories of expertise in empirical research on law.

As explained on the NLR website www.newlegalrealism.org,  this joint project has as its goal "to develop rigorous, genuinely interdisciplinary approaches to the empirical study of law." NLR scholars hope to encourage an organized and informed approach "within the legal academy for translating and integrating diverse social science disciplines and methodologies."

Articles from the initial NLR conference, held in Madison, are appearing in a unique collaborative publication between the Wisconsin Law Review (Vol. 2005, No. 2) and Law & Social Inquiry, a top peer-reviewed journal in sociolegal studies.

Subsequent events have included workshops in Madison and Chicago, and a conference on empirical studies of women and work, jointly sponsored by the Feminism and Legal Theory Workshop at Emory University School of Law.

Malcolm Feeley, current President of the Law & Society Association, comments, "I'm pleased to see the rise of the New Legal Realism movement.  It is of course fitting that it come from Wisconsin. ... One of my colleagues at Berkeley once identified me as one of the members of the 'Wisconsin School.'  I was a bit surprised, but pleased: to be associated with Wisconsin is in my book a very good thing. When I asked him what he meant, his response included the following: 'institutional analysis,' 'associated with close empirical analysis,' 'interdisciplinary,' and 'of course, the long tradition extending back to John R. Commons, Selig Pearlman, up to Willard Hurst and the many who are interested in law and social science who are or have been there.' "

Wisconsin has long been recognized as one of the key centers -- many would
argue the birthplace -- of sociolegal studies, and many current and former  members of the UW Law School faculty have served as presidents and other officers of the Law & Society Association.

Submitted by on July 13, 2006

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