ICLE Academic Affiliate 2026-2027 Update

ICLE’s Academic Affiliates program is our primary way of staying engaged with and supporting law & econ scholars. Affiliates are able to participate in all of ICLE’s public programs, receive invitations to occasional affiliate-specific events, and are eligible to participate in ICLE’s various scholarship support programs. Many of these are discussed below.

Our affiliate network comprises nearly 100 academics from around the world. You can see the full list here.

Being an ICLE affiliate comes with no obligation other than an informal expectation that you occasionally engage with us. We will periodically reach out if we have not heard from you in a while to check in and see whether the relationship remains valuable to you.

New Affiliates! This year, we welcomed the following individuals to the network: Reiko Aoki, Derek Bambauer, Jane Bambauer, Chris Berg, J. Shahar Dillbary, Martin Edwards, David Gindis, Colin Harris, Dae-Sik Hong, Murat Mungan, Jeffrey T. Prince, Toshiaki Takigawa, Sayako Takizawa, Henry Thompson, Cento Veljanovski, Ming-Li Wang.

Collaboration Awards. Last year we announced a new program to encourage new collaborations between ICLE affiliates: upon publication of a paper coauthored by ICLE affiliates who have not worked together before, coauthors will receive a grant of at least $5,000 (split between them). This past year Eric Alston & Andy Morriss and J. Shahar Dillbary & Murat Mungan received these awards. Congratulations on the successful collaboration!

AI Primer. Following discussions at ICLE’s Fourth Annual Academic Affiliates Retreat, we have developed a practical field guide for working with AI. The guide offers recommended workflows, tools, and best practices for law & economics scholars and is now available on our website. We hope it is useful, and also welcome any suggestions that you may have to improve it. 

Retreat & Mini-retreats. Speaking of the retreat, be on the lookout for news about upcoming retreats for ICLE affiliates. We plan to launch a new series of “mini-retreats” this year – opportunities throughout the year for a dozen or so ICLE affiliates to get together, catch up, and share current works in progress. We are also considering changes to the format of our annual affiliates retreat, to allow for more ICLE affiliates to attend each year.

We are proud to offer a range of resources and opportunities to support our academic affiliates. Some are highlighted below.

Occasional Support. From time to time you may find yourself in need of a small amount of funding – enough to cover a visiting speaker, travel to a conference, a subscription to software needed to complete a project, funding for a summer RA. We are pleased to offer high-impact small grants to cover costs such as these.”

Draft Exchange. We have probably all experienced it: you send out a paper to a half dozen people soliciting feedback, never to hear anything. Or, worse, you receive a paper from a colleague and it sits unread in your inbox for months, until you apologize for having never offered feedback when you see them at a conference. 

We are experimenting with a new draft exchange program this year. The idea is simple: send us a draft that you would like feedback on. We’ll send you a paper to offer feedback on in exchange. You don’t get any feedback on your paper until you provide feedback on another paper. But you will get feedback on your paper once you do provide feedback on another paper. 

Works in Progress Workshops. This past spring we launched a new ad-hoc Works in Progress Workshop Series. If you have a paper you would like to present let us know and we will organize an online workshop around it. To ensure useful feedback, we will work with you to recruit two commenters to discuss your paper. Workshops are scheduled on an ad-hoc basis and are open to all ICLE affiliates as both presenters and audience.

Commissioned Research. Several times a year we look for scholars who can write commissioned papers on specific topics. Our needs may dictate parameters such as specific topic, methodology, and style (e.g., journal publication vs white paper) but authors of commissioned works retain full control over conclusions and publication decisions. If you are interested in potentially writing on a commissioned basis, please let us know.

We end this update with two questions for you:

CLE Credit for ICLE Programming. We are exploring the possibility of offering Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit for select ICLE programming, including a mix of our online and in-person events. [Economists: CLE is a requirement for membership in the lawyerly guilds.] Offering CLE would be a non-trivial undertaking, especially in the first few years, so we would like your input on whether, and how, to offer it. If you are interested in ICLE-offered CLE, please complete this form.

Grant Administration and Support. We are also exploring developing a grant administration and support program. This program would offer a lightweight, and lower-overhead, alternative for grants that do not necessarily need the full machinery offered by a university-scale research office. We do not expect that this would be a high-demand program – but it could be very helpful for those who find it appealing. If that might be you, please let us know.