Academic

Tamanaha on Quantitative Studies of Judging

By Lawrence Solum

Brian Z. Tamanaha (St. John's University - School of Law) has posted The Distorting Slant of Quantitative Studies of Judging (Boston College Law Review, Vol. 50, 2009) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

One of the hottest areas of legal scholarship today involves quantitative studies of judging. This article will attempt to shift the current orientation of this work by making two basic points. The first point is that the field was born in a collection of false beliefs and misunderstandings about the formalists and the realists which has distorted how political scientists have modeled judging and how they have designed and interpreted their studies. Rather than conduct an open inquiry into the nature of judging, political scientists set out to debunk formalism by proving that judging is infused with politics, a mission that warped the development of the field. 

The second point is that the results of their studies below the Supreme Court strongly confirm what judges have been saying for many decades - that their judicial decisions are substantially determined by the law. Political scientists have tended to repress this finding, however, by focusing on the wrong point: repeating time and again that their studies show that politics matters without also emphasizing that it matters very little. A balanced realism about judging accepts that - owing to the uncertainty of law and the inherent limitations of human decision makers - it is inevitable that there will be a certain (minimal) degree of political influence in judicial decision making, but this does not detract from the broader claim that judges can and usually do rule in accordance with the law.
 

Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).