Elliott Ash received his PhD in economics from Columbia University, where he was supervised by Bentley MacLeod, Suresh Naidu, and Massimo Morelli. Elliott's thesis research focused on empirical analysis of judge behavior and text mining of legal documents. Elliott plans to push this research agenda forward as a CSDP fellow and thereafter as an assistant professor of economics at University of Warwick.

Before obtaining his PhD, Elliott received a BA in economics, government, and philosophy from University of Texas at Austin, a JD from Columbia Law School, and an LLM in international criminal law from University of Amsterdam. More recently, his research on the judiciary is facilitated by affiliation with the Free Law Project, which aims to provide free and open source legal corpora and research tools to practitioners and social scientists. Finally, Elliott has provided expert witness testimony for the Department of Justice Civil Rights investigation into discriminatory practices at Ferguson Police Department.