All legal systems assume that the law influences people's choices. Society can influence people's decisions and encourage certain behaviors, while discouraging others. The Center for Empirical Legal Studies of Decision Making and the Law is dedicated to studying the way these processes occur, the factors influencing them, and their limitations. The Center brings together scholars from different areas: law, economics, and psychology in order to evaluate and scrutinize the theoretical paradigms that govern legal analysis. Its research agenda focuses on how different legal regimes affect behavior in a diverse set of cases. Specifically, the Center focuses on four areas:
From a methodological perspective participants in the center utilize two primary types of tools. The first are experimental tools, which have seldom been used in legal scholarship in the past. The second are observational tools, with special attention directed at the creation of new data sets, referring primarily to the Israeli legal system, economy, and society. Cooperation between researchers from different disciplines and the use of different methodologies create unique synergies that bring about cutting edge research.