New scholarly law blog on launchpad

I recently received this notice about a great-looking new group blog by law professors:

Monday, February 20, 2006, we will launch the Empirical Legal Studies Blog, a collaborative effort of Jason Czarnezki (Marquette), Michael Heise (Cornell), William Ford (Chicago), and Theodore Eisenberg (Cornell). The ELS Blog is devoted to advancing productive and interdisciplinary discourse among empirical legal scholars. The ELS Blog will serve as an online forum to discuss and provide links for emerging empirical legal scholarship, provide conference updates, discuss empirical claims that have emerged in public and political discourse, facilitate discussion for guest empirical scholars, and assess current empirical findings and methodologies.

Sentencing fans should plan to make regular stops at the ELS Blog.  Not only have two of the editors (Michael Heise and Theodore Eisenberg) done a lot of empirical work on sentencing-related topics, but the ELS Blog also has two law profs who explore guideline sentencing (Max Schanzenbach and John Pfaff) scheduled for guest blogging stints in coming weeks.  In addition, the ELS Blog has planned an intriguing “Blog Forum” on “Law Clerks as Research Subjects” for March.

UPDATE:  This notable post at the ELS Blog about “perceived ideology scores” of the current Justices already has me intrigued about an empirical work that scores the author of the decisions in Blakely and Crawford (Justice Scalia) as the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.