Epstein, Landes, and Posner: The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice

Professor Dr. Lee Epstein, Professor Dr. William M. Landes, and Senior Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, have published The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Here is the publisher’s description:

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors’ view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making.

HT @law_book

Legal Informatics Papers @ HICSS 2013

At least two legal informatics papers will be presented this week at HICSS 46 (a.k.a. HICSS 2013): Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, being held 7-10 January 2013 in Maui, Hawaii:

• Keith Walker and Douglas Oard: Extending Argument Maps To Provide Decision Support For Rulemaking
• Petra Asprion and Gerhard Knolmayer: Assimilation of Compliance Software in Highly Regulated Industries: An Empirical Multitheoretical Investigation

I’ve requested abstracts from the authors and if the authors allow posting of their abstracts I will post what I receive.

Meanwhile, for abstracts or full text of the papers please contact the authors.

Click here for the complete conference program.

The Twitter hashtags for the conference appear to be #hicss46 and #hicss.

If you know of other legal informatics papers to be presented at HICSS, please mention them in the comments.

Zorn et al.: Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court Revisited

Professor Dr. Christopher Zorn of Penn State University, and Professor Dr. Gregory Caldeira and Professor Dr. John (Jack) Wright, both of Ohio State University, presented a paper entitled Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court Revisited, at CELS 2012: Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, held 9-10 November at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Here is the abstract:

We reevaluate the influence of amici curiae on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant certiorari. Using expanded data on four representative Court terms, we find that at the same time that the number of amicus filings on certiorari have grown — and perhaps owing to it — the influence of those briefs on the probability of the Court granting certiorari has steadily declined between 1968 and 2007. In addition, we find that the positive influence of briefs in opposition to certiorari noted in some earlier work appears to be an artifact of a particular Term. Among other things, these findings hold implications for the extent to which case selection effects might bias empirical scholarship on the Supreme Court.

Legal Informatics and Legal Communication @ ILEC 5

Several legal informatics or legal communication papers or presentations have been given at ILEC 5: The 2012 International Legal Ethics Conference, held 12-14 July 2012 in Banff, Alberta, Canada.

The Twitter hashtags for the conference were:

• #ilec2012
• #ilec5
• #ilecv

Here are archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format:

• Archived Tweets with hashtag #ILEC2012
• Archived Tweets with hashtag #ilec5
• Archived Tweets with hashtag #ilecv

Click here for the conference program.

Topics include confidentiality of lawyer-client communications, legal educational technology, empirical methods for the study of legal ethics, the quantitative measurement of legal ethical behavior, virtual law practice and other forms of law practice technology, and quantitative legal prediction.

Casellas on Legal Ontology Engineering

Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute has published Legal Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Modelling Trends, and the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (Springer, 2011) (Law, Governance and Technology Series ; Vol. 3). Here is the publisher’s description:

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.

During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.

This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.

Talley and O’Cane on A Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements

Professor Eric L. Talley and Drew O’Cane, both of University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and the Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy, have posted The Measure of a MAC: A Quasi-Experimental Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

We develop a protocol for using a well known lawyer-coded data set on Material Adverse Change/Effect clauses in acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on both regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches, is designed to replicate, correct, and extend the reach of the hand-coded data. Our preliminary results indicate that both approaches perform well, though a hybridized approach improves predictive power even more. We employ Monte Carlo simulations show that our results generally carry over to out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that similar approaches could be used much more broadly in empirical legal scholarship, most specifically in the study of transactional documents in business law.

Bommarito, Katz, and Isaacs: An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions

Michael J. Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, and Jillian Isaacs-See of BDO USA, LLP, have published An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions, Virginia Tax Review, 30, 523-557 (2011). Here is the abstract:

What can empirical data tell us about the jurisprudence of United States Tax Court? Which sections of the Internal Revenue Code are most frequently cited and has recent tax legislation sparked change in the Tax Court’s decisions? This article presents an analysis of the citation practices of the United States Tax Court between 1990 and 2008. While previous citation studies focus on case-to-case citations, we modify this approach to focus on statutory citations, which better capture the nature of tax jurisprudence. By applying techniques from computer science, we collect and analyze more than 11,000 decisions and 244,000 statutory citations authored by the United States Tax Court between 1990 and 2008. Our approach includes both a static and longitudinal analysis of the most cited Internal Revenue Code sections. In addition, we carry out a network analysis of these case-to-statute citations to uncover patterns in citation practices, concept relationships, and legislative acts. This article answers the call for greater empiricism in tax scholarship and paves the way for future research on Tax Court jurisprudence.

De Mulder et al. on CORMAS: A Computerized Tool for the Analysis of Eyewitness Memory Correspondence

Professor Richard V. De Mulder of the Erasmus University Centre for Computers and Law, and colleagues, have published CORMAS: A Computerized Tool for the Analysis of Eyewitness Memory Correspondence, European Journal of Law and Technology, v. 1, no. 3 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper presents a new approach to the study and assessment of eyewitness memory reports. The Eyewitmem Project, an interdisciplinary research initiative financed by the European Commission, attempts to use psychological knowledge and computer-aided document analysis as well as magnetic (fMRI) scans of the brain to measure the reliability of eyewitness statements in legal contexts. The paper focuses mainly on the document analysis part of the project, for which the CODAS software, developed by Erasmus University, is used.

Rhodes on The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability

Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University Law Library and the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive, has published Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability, Law Library Journal, v. 102, no. 4 (2010) [article 33]. Here is the abstract:

[This paper] explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites.

Oard et al. on Evaluation of Information Retrieval for E-discovery

Associate Dean Douglas W. Oard of the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, and colleagues, have published Evaluation of Information Retrieval for E-discovery, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

The effectiveness of information retrieval technology in electronic discovery (E-discovery) has become the subject of judicial rulings and practitioner controversy. The scale and nature of E-discovery tasks, however, has pushed traditional information retrieval evaluation approaches to their limits. This paper reviews the legal and operational context of E-discovery and the approaches to evaluating search technology that have evolved in the research community. It then describes a multi-year effort carried out as part of the Text Retrieval Conference to develop evaluation methods for responsive review tasks in E-discovery. This work has led to new approaches to measuring effectiveness in both batch and interactive frameworks, large data sets, and some surprising results for the recall and precision of Boolean and statistical information retrieval methods. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts about future research in both the legal and technical communities toward the goal of reliable, effective use of information retrieval in E-discovery.