The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) is a peer-edited, peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality, empirically-oriented articles of interest to scholars in a diverse range of law and law-related fields, including civil justice, corporate law, criminal justice, domestic relations, economics, finance, health care, political science, psychology, public policy, securities regulation, and sociology. Both experimental and nonexperimental data analysis are welcome, as are law-related empirical studies from around the world.

Launched in 2004, JELS is devoted to the dissemination of empirical studies of the legal system. The Journal's editors and editorial advisory boards comprise renowned international scholars from diverse disciplines, including law, statistics, economics, psychology, industrial relations, and dispute resolution. Recognizing that many legal and policy debates hinge on assumptions about the operation of the legal system, the Journal seeks to encourage and promote the careful, dispassionate testing of these assumptions. The editorial policy of the Journal is open to empirical work from any disciplinary or ideological approach to the study of law.

Empirical analysis of the legal system has a long, if spotty, tradition in the academy. Many legal realists of the 1930s made their mark with empirical studies. A growing number of contemporary scholars recognize the value of empirical analysis in understanding the legal system and its role in society. JELS provides an outlet for publication of high quality empirical work, supporting and encouraging this growing field of study.

There is currently a gap in the legal and social science literature that has often left scholars, lawyers, and policymakers without basic knowledge of legal systems or with false or distorted impressions. Even simple descriptive data about the functioning of courts and the legal systems are often lacking. Reform and intellectual debate have previously proceeded in an empirical vacuum. Courts and lawyers often do not know what to make of empirical findings in part because they so rarely encounter them. JELS fills this gap.

The time is ripe for empirical studies of the legal system. With the explosion in information technology, data sources on the legal system are improving in quality and accessibility. Compared with just a few years ago, researchers today can easily access original data sets. For example, using internet browsers and the archive at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, academic researchers can obtain data ranging from the RAND studies of jury verdicts in California and Chicago, to the Wisconsin Civil Litigation Research Project's data, to the Federal Judicial Center's archives of all federal court cases. A major goal of JELS is to make these and other worldwide data sets more widely known and used. JELS papers should clearly document their data sources and methodology so that all researchers can access, replicate, and criticize the analysis and results.

JELS has an International Advisory Board that includes empirical scholars from around the world, including Japan, continental Europe, Scandinavia, England, and Australia. Journals edited in the United States sometimes exhibit a form of provincialism in assessing empirical work based in foreign countries. If there are no direct and obvious implications for the United States, the data are sometimes treated as being of insufficient interest to warrant publication. JELS will have a self-consciously international perspective. An article that provides useful insights into the experience of a country will be judged by the article's potential appeal to a worldwide audience and not solely to a U.S. readership.

By the time the first issue of JELS was published in January of 2004, controversial, topical, and thought-provoking articles from the first volume had already been discussed and debated in The New York Times, The Economist, the Financial Times (London), the Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune.