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 near-impossible 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.