Law Commons^™

The Dynamic Cycle Of Legal Change, John Martinez

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

Justice Holmes's observation that the law is a product of empirical experience, not a problem of mathematics, leaves us with the task of figuring out how the legal system actually works. Although Holmes made his statement over 130 years ago, there is still no universally accepted analytical approach for describing how the American legal system creates and changes the law. This article proposes a "Dynamic Cycle of Legal Change" as a model for understanding the structure and operation of the American legal system.

Part I first posits that we should consider the legal system from an "information systems" perspective. Part …