August 29-30, 2014
University of California, Irvine School of Law

Co-sponsored by
The University of California, Irvine School of Law &
The American Bar Foundation

Overview

The original Legal Realists ushered in an era of interest in legal educational reform and legal research focused on the actual life of law in action, hopefully informed by the best methods and insights that social science had to offer …. and with the goal of developing lawyers and
legal policies that could respond effectively to real world problems. At the turn of the millennium, renewed interest in social science and legal educational reform began to emerge in the legal academy in the U.S. and then in Europe as well. In 2004, a group of scholars met in
Madison, Wisconsin to hold the first U.S. New Legal Realism conference, which was cosponsored by the American Bar Foundation. The decade since that conference has seen increasing interest in forms of “new legal realism,” from using social science to help reform legal education, to drawing on empirical research in legal scholarship with an eye to developing better translations for use in legal practice. A Collaborative Research Network (#28), under the aegis of the U.S. Law & Society Association, as well as the “New Legal Realism Project” webpage and blog, have helped to foster collaborative events and create networks among interested researchers. In 2012, the first European conference on New Legal Realism was held in Copenhagen, bringing scholars from multiple traditions together.

The 10th Anniversary New Legal Realism Conference, co-sponsored by the University of California-Irvine Law School and the American Bar Foundation, built on the many foundations laid by these various efforts. The conversation begun in Copenhagen challenged New Legal Realists and legal empiricists of quite different stripes to communicate across disciplinary and political boundaries. In Irvine, that challenge continued. How shall we define today’s “New Legal Realism”? What can it contribute to improving legal education for an embattled new generation of lawyers and legal educators? Could a new form of legal realism help to bridge the divide between law-in-books and law-on-the-ground, bringing legal education closer to the practice of law-in-action? Our Program invited some leading legal and social science thinkers, and some path-breaking legal educators to tackle these important questions.

To read more about the conference panels and invited speakers, see the conference program.

Symposium

The UC Irvine Law Review (June 2016) published select articles to memorialize the 10th Anniversary NLR Conference.  Articles can be downloaded from the UCI website.

Conference Pictures