Abstract
What role does empirical work play in law? Where is that work leading? And why might (or might not) one be skeptical? Rather than answer these questions abstractly and top-down—a nearimpossible task—this issue of the Stanford Law Review addresses these questions bottom-up, through the lens of particular substantive fields. It selects some of the best papers presented at CELS as a springboard to contextualize the intellectual history of questions in the field, to provide a sense of why empirical work has become so important in legal scholarship, and to develop a more affirmative vision for empirical work in law.