A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and…

MITAuto-check passed

Install Jle Topic Selection

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jle-topic-selection -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills jle-topic-selection --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/Journal-of-Law-and-Economics-Skills/skills/jle-topic-selection .claude/skills/jle-topic-selection && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
jle-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.8k tokens
SKILL.md length
893 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and…

  • Works in 4 steps: One-sentence legal/economic question… → Why a law-and-economics audience cares —… → The institutional detail that makes it… → …
  • Deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies
  • SKILL.md covers When to trigger, The JLE fit test, Sharpening the question (do… and Checklist, plus 5 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Jle Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and Economics Review, and what its central legal/regulatory question should be. Sets venue fit and question scope; it does not design the identification (see jle-identification).

Its SKILL.md is about 1.8k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. | 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies
  • The American Law and Economics Review
  • What its central legal/regulatory question should be

Example prompts

  • “/jle-topic-selection”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. One-sentence legal/economic question with the rule and the object named: "What is the effect of legal rule R on outcome Y for agents A…
  2. Why a law-and-economics audience cares — name the regulatory or doctrinal debate the answer informs (e.g., damages caps and litigation…
  3. The institutional detail that makes it real — when does the rule bind, who is exempt, what is the counterfactual legal regime; if you…
  4. The credible-design or model seed — a law change, a threshold, a court/case assignment, an enforcement event, or a model whose comparative…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Jle Topic Selection loads about 1.8k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 93 tokens; SKILL.md has 893 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~93
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.8k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 893 words, ~1,846 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/jle-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
jle-topic-selection
description
Use when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and Economics Review, and what its central legal/regulatory question should be. Sets venue fit and question scope; it does not design the identification (see jle-identification).

Topic Selection & Venue Fit (jle-topic-selection)

When to trigger

  • A project analyzes a law, a regulation, a court, or a legal institution economically, but you are unsure it is "JLE-shaped"
  • The question reads like doctrinal legal scholarship, an organizational-governance study, or a generic applied-micro paper — and you need to place it
  • The same dataset (court records, enforcement actions, statute panels) supports several framings and you must pick the one that lands here
  • A co-author asks "why JLE and not the Journal of Legal Studies or JLEO?"

The JLE fit test

JLE wants economic analysis of law, regulation, and legal institutions where a real legal/regulatory question is answered with a credible empirical design or a disciplined theoretical model, in the Chicago price-theory-plus-institutions tradition. The legal rule or institution must be load-bearing — not background color for a generic economics paper, and not a doctrinal argument dressed in regression.

Signal in your projectLikely fit
A legal rule / regulation / enforcement regime changes behavior, and you identify the effect crediblyJLE (core)
The contribution is primarily doctrinal or normative-legal, lightly empiricallean Journal of Legal Studies (also UChicago, more legal/doctrinal)
The question is about organizations, governance, or positive political economy / institutions-as-equilibrialean JLEO
Solid law-and-econ but incremental, field-internal, or a shorter contributionAmerican Law and Economics Review
The legal angle is incidental; it is really labor/public/IO with a law labela field journal or AEJ, not JLE
Pure mechanism-design / contract theory with no legal institutiona theory journal, not JLE

JLE is question-first and institution-respecting: an empirical paper needs the rule's mechanics right (who is bound, when it binds, what the counterfactual rule is); a theory paper needs comparative statics about a legal rule that someone could in principle test or recognize in the world.

Sharpening the question (do this before writing anything)

  1. One-sentence legal/economic question with the rule and the object named: "What is the effect of legal rule R on outcome Y for agents A, identified by [the change/threshold/assignment]?"
  2. Why a law-and-economics audience cares — name the regulatory or doctrinal debate the answer informs (e.g., damages caps and litigation, merger policy and prices, sentencing and deterrence).
  3. The institutional detail that makes it real — when does the rule bind, who is exempt, what is the counterfactual legal regime; if you cannot state this, the topic is not yet JLE-shaped.
  4. The credible-design or model seed — a law change, a threshold, a court/case assignment, an enforcement event, or a model whose comparative statics are testable; if none, route to jle-identification or jle-theory-model.

Checklist

  • One-sentence question naming the legal rule/institution and the economic outcome
  • Venue placed against the table; the reason it is JLE and not JLS / JLEO / ALER written in one line
  • The legal-institutional mechanics stated (who is bound, when it binds, the counterfactual rule)
  • The regulatory or doctrinal debate the answer speaks to, named
  • A candidate design (law change / threshold / assignment / enforcement event) or a testable model
  • No causal overclaim from a design that cannot support it, and no doctrinal argument standing in for evidence
Show full SKILL.md (390 more words)Show less

Anti-patterns

  • A generic applied-micro paper with a thin legal label sent to JLE for "fit" — desk-reject risk
  • Doctrinal/normative legal argument with token regressions (belongs at JLS, or is not yet a JLE paper)
  • An organizations / positive-political-economy study that is really JLEO-shaped
  • "Interesting court dataset, no question" — data availability is not a contribution
  • Getting the institution wrong (treating a non-binding rule as binding, ignoring exemptions or enforcement gaps)

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A researcher has scraped two decades of state appellate decisions and wants to "study judges and the economy." That is a dataset, not a question. Working through the fit test: the cleanest variation is the staggered random assignment of cases to judges with measurably different priors — a court-assignment design. The question becomes "what is the effect of being assigned a pro-defendant judge on firm investment after a contract dispute, identified by random case assignment?" The doctrinal debate is whether judicial discretion creates legal uncertainty that chills investment; the institution is real (assignment rules, recusal, appeal). Now it is JLE-shaped — and clearly not a doctrinal JLS note or a JLEO governance study.

The field areas JLE is built for

A project lands more naturally if it sits in one of JLE's historical strengths. Use this to confirm the question is recognizably law-and-economics:

  • Antitrust & competition — merger effects, collusion, market definition, the economics of enforcement and consent decrees
  • Regulation & its incidence — who bears the cost of a rule, capture, the Stigler/Peltzman theory of regulation, deregulation episodes
  • Crime & deterrence — the Becker margin (probability × severity), sentencing, enforcement intensity, recidivism
  • Property & contract — entitlements and bargaining (Coase), contract enforcement, property-rights regimes
  • Corporate & securities law — disclosure rules, governance mandates, securities enforcement, litigation
  • Litigation & courts — selection of disputes (Priest–Klein), fee rules, damages caps, judicial behavior
  • Intellectual property — patent/copyright scope, infringement, innovation incentives
  • Political economy of law — lawmaking, lobbying, the supply of legal rules

If the question does not sit in or adjacent to one of these, re-examine whether the legal institution is really load-bearing.

Sibling-placement quick test

  • Is the deliverable an economic effect of a legal rule, credibly identified? → JLE
  • Is it primarily a doctrinal or normative-legal argument? → Journal of Legal Studies
  • Is it about organizations, governance, or institutions-as-equilibria? → JLEO
  • Is it solid but incremental law-and-econ? → American Law and Economics Review
  • Would a non-law economist cite it without caring about the rule? → a field journal, not JLE

Output format

【Question】one sentence, legal rule + economic outcome + agents named
【Venue verdict】JLE because [not JLS: ___] [not JLEO: ___] [not ALER: ___]
【Institutional mechanics】who is bound / when it binds / counterfactual rule: ___
【Debate it informs】regulatory or doctrinal question: ___
【Design or model seed】law change / threshold / assignment / enforcement event / testable model
【Next step】jle-literature-positioning

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in Journal-of-Law-and-Economics-Skills/skills/jle-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Jle Topic Selection next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Jle Topic Selection compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Jle Topic Selection this skillbrycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills1.2k—~1.8kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
TopicsZimoLiao/scholaraio577—~294Automated safety check: PassMIT
Topic Modelingbrycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills4.5k—~3.7kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Law Of SimilarityOwl-Listener/designer-skills2.9k—~1.2kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Bestblogs Topicginobefun/BestBlogs4k—~670Automated safety check: PassNone
Zsxq Topicitwanger/toBeBetterJavaer18k—~564Automated safety check: PassNone

Similar skills

  • Topics

    ZimoLiao/scholaraio

    A skill your agent uses when the user asks about research themes, topic distribution, BERTopic clustering, topic overview, topic papers, topic merges, or HTML topic visualizations.

    577 GitHub stars~294 tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Topic Modeling

    brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills

    Structural topic modeling: STM spec, topic count, coherence-exclusivity.

    4.5k GitHub stars~3.7k tokensUpdated 4 days ago
    AI & LLM EngineeringAuto-check passed
  • Law Of Similarity

    Owl-Listener/designer-skills

    Apply the Law of Similarity — shared colour, shape, or size signals that elements belong to one category.

    2.9k GitHub stars~1.2k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Frontend & DesignAuto-check passed
  • Bestblogs Topic

    ginobefun/BestBlogs

    A skill your agent uses when the user asks about a specific topic, subject area, or wants to explore curated topic pages on BestBlogs.

    4k GitHub stars~670 tokensUpdated 3 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Zsxq Topic

    itwanger/toBeBetterJavaer

    知识星球主题管理:搜索主题、查看主题详情、发布帖子、编辑主题、发表评论、回复某条评论(楼中楼)、回答提问、删除主题;通过 api call 查看主题评论列表、设置精华、设置标签、查看自己提的问题与已回答记录。当用户需要查找内容、发帖、编辑主题、评论、回复评论、回答问题、删除主题、查看主题评论、查看自己的提问记录、或管理主题精华和标签时使用。

    18k GitHub stars~564 tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed
  • Writing Law

    Norman-bury/research-writing-skill

    A skill your agent uses when writing law papers - provides legal writing conventions, citation formats, and argumentation guidance

    3.4k GitHub stars~592 tokensUpdated 4 mo ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed

More from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

All 2,387 skills in this repo
  • Aaag Data Analysis

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running and reporting the analysis for an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial statistics and modeling, remote-sensing accuracy, or…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Literature Positioning

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when positioning an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript in the literature — engaging geographic scholarship across the relevant area and the…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Rebuttal

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when responding to an Annals of the American Association of Geographers decision letter (major/minor revision) — building a point-by-point response to the subject editor and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Research Design

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when defending the research design of an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial/quantitative analysis and GIScience, remote-sensing and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Review Process

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when you need to understand how the Annals of the American Association of Geographers evaluates a manuscript — double-anonymous review routed through a subject editor by…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Submission

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running the final pre-submission preflight for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers via ScholarOne Manuscripts — area/article-type selection…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.6k tokensUpdated 12 days ago
    Auto-check passed

Questions about Jle Topic Selection

What does Jle Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and…. Jle Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies, JLEO, or the American Law and Economics Review, and what its central legal/regulatory question should be.

When should I use Jle Topic Selection?

Jle Topic Selection fits situations like: deciding whether a law-and-economics project belongs at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE) rather than the Journal of Legal Studies; the American Law and Economics Review; what its central legal/regulatory question should be.

How do I install Jle Topic Selection in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jle-topic-selection -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (Journal-of-Law-and-Economics-Skills/skills/jle-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/jle-topic-selection in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Jle Topic Selection in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jle-topic-selection -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (Journal-of-Law-and-Economics-Skills/skills/jle-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/jle-topic-selection in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Jle Topic Selection in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jle-topic-selection -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/jle-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/jle-topic-selection, .github/skills/jle-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/jle-topic-selection in your project.

What does Jle Topic Selection need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Jle Topic Selection is instructions for the agent only.

Does Jle Topic Selection access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Jle Topic Selection safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Jle Topic Selection use?

Jle Topic Selection is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Jle Topic Selection use?

About 1.8k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7.4k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Jle Topic Selection?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Jle Topic Selection: Topics (ZimoLiao/scholaraio, 577 stars), Topic Modeling (brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills, 4.5k stars), Law Of Similarity (Owl-Listener/designer-skills, 2.9k stars) and Bestblogs Topic (ginobefun/BestBlogs, 4k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Jle Topic Selection?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,228 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.