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Full-Text Articles in Judges
Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen
Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen
Articles
We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet, discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The extent to which legal outcomes are predictable in given contexts is surely testable empirically. But the idea that doctrine’s capacity to produce or limit those outcomes can be measured empirically is fundamentally misguided. The problem is that to measure doctrinal determinacy, …
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
Articles
This Article starts with a puzzle: Why is the doctrinal approach to “proximate cause” so resilient despite longstanding criticism? Proximate cause is a particularly extreme example of doctrine that limps along despite near universal consensus that it cannot actually determine legal outcomes. Why doesn’t that widely recognized indeterminacy disable proximate cause as a decision-making device? To address this puzzle, I pick up a cue from the legal realists, a group of skeptical lawyers, law professors, and judges, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, compared legal doctrine to ritual magic. I take that comparison seriously, perhaps more seriously, and definitely in …
Law, Morality And The Judge: Robert M. Cover's Justice Accused, Raymond L. Faust
Law, Morality And The Judge: Robert M. Cover's Justice Accused, Raymond L. Faust
IUSTITIA
The intellectual world of the nineteenth century judge was one in which the two main concerns relevant to our topic here were what the judge's role ought to be in the evolution of law in a democratic society, and whether a recognition and application of 'natural law' was ever appropriate to a legal system. Professor Cover reviews exhaustively the eighteenth and nineteenth century sources from which American judges drew their ideas on these subjects, and studies practically all of the antebellum slavery litigation to discover how judges actually applied these doctrines in the context of slavery cases. What he comes …