The Structure of Legal Rules and the Analysis of Judicial Decisions
46 Pages Posted: 30 Jan 2007
Date Written: January 30, 2007
Abstract
One of the most successful lines of inquiry in judicial politics has been the study of fact patterns, in which scholars have shown a general consistency between the facts of a case and judicial decisions across several areas of the law. These findings quantitatively illustrate how courts often follow legal rules, which define the relationship between case facts and case outcomes. In this paper, I argue that the methodological approach that political scientists have taken has left largely unstudied the true structure of legal rules and judicial decision making. After discussing why traditional statistical methods are too restrictive to capture the structure of legal rules and legal reasoning, I introduce the use of a largely unexplored method in political science - classification trees - to study the mapping between case facts and judicial outcomes. I argue that this method is more likely to capture the hierarchical and dichotomous nature of judicial decisions. Analyses of search and seizure and confession cases demonstrate that classification trees can increase our understanding of the structure of legal rules, as well as unify political science and legal conceptions of legal doctrine and judicial decision making.
Keywords: Judicial decision-making, legal rules, fact patterns, classification trees
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