From the Editor

Extract

The articles in this issue of the Review offer some unusual insights about the costs, obstacles, and opportunities encountered in sociolegal research. Sociolegal scholarship recognizes and regularly attempts to remove the blinders from doctrinal legal analysis, but it often neglects the blinders that arise from the familiar analytic approaches of its own traditions. Traditional doctrinal legal analysis is criticized for relying on untested assumptions about human behavior, equating law on the books with law in action, and attending only to the public face of law. But there are also limitations in the methodological approaches used in standard empirical analysis, and they too can profoundly distort our images of sociolegal phenomena. The articles in this issue show how careful and skeptical analysis of imperfect data can reduce these distortions and increase our knowledge about legal phenomena.