Jurisprudence Commons^™

Will Quants Rule The (Legal) World?, Edward K. Cheng

Michigan Law Review

The quants are coming! And they are here to stay-so argues Professor Ian Ayres' in his new book, Super Crunchers, which details the brave new world of statistical prediction and how it has already begun to affect our lives. For years, academic researchers have known about the considerable and at times surprising advantages of statistical models over the considered judgments of experienced clinicians and experts. Today, these models are emerging all over the landscape. Whether the field is wine, baseball, medicine, or consumer relations, they are vying against traditional experts for control over how we make decisions. To be …

Due Process Traditionalism, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

In important cases, the Supreme Court has limited the scope of "substantive due process" by reference to tradition, but it has yet to explain why it has done so. Due process traditionalism might be defended in several distinctive ways. The most ambitious defense draws on a set of ideas associated with Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek, who suggested that traditions have special credentials by virtue of their acceptance by many minds. But this defense runs into three problems. Those who have participated in a tradition may not have accepted any relevant proposition; they might suffer from a systematic bias; and …

The Paradoxes Of Legal Science: A Review, Rousseau A. Burch

Michigan Law Review

This book by the distinguished Chief Judge of the New York court of appeals deals with difficulties of the judicial process when its function is creative; that is, when a judge makes law for novel situations.

The title of the book assumes there is a science of law, and the introduction takes analogues of physical science for a starting point. In physics there are rest and motion, static and dynamic ; in social affairs there are stability and changes, conservation and progress. In making decisions, the judge may be concerned with the yea of action in alteration, and the nay …