Saturday, March 20, 2010

Brophy on Empiricism, the Rule of Law and the Antebellum Judiciary

Quantitative Legal History—Empirics and the Rule of Law in the Antebellum Judiciary, by Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina Law School, is up on “The Legal Workshop” website of the Duke Law Journal. It commences:
This symposium asks how we can quantify and evaluate what judges do. Some of the papers are skeptical of attempts at quantification. These questions are of importance to legal historians, who frequently seek to link judicial behavior to larger cultural, economic, and political trends. This essay suggests some ways that one might quantify and thus measure an important and central issue for legal historians: how did appellate judges define, work with, and alter the “rule of law”?
More.

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