A Response to Professor Knight

Abstract

Written as part of the 2009 Duke Law Journal Conference on Measuring Judges and Justice, this short essay is an invited response to Professor Jack Knight’s article, Are Empiricists Asking the Right Questions About Judicial Decisionmaking?, Duke Law Journal, Vol. 58, p. 1531, 2009. Professor Knight’s article, in addition to being written in clear and graceful English, is a reason for great hope that the astronomical distance between empirical work and the concerns of normative legal analysts is diminishing rapidly. Professor Knight is proposing in part that social scientists turn their formidable tools on opinion writing not to exorcise once more the formalist bogeyman but to deepen our understanding of what opinions do and how they do it... and, ultimately, how we evaluate judges. This essay argues that empirical work along the lines that Professor Knight proposes will prove to be of great interest not only to other empiricists but also to judges, practicing lawyers, and scholars who write normatively about the courts. Indeed, the future of social science research into the activity of judging bears exciting promise, not only for those engaged in it, but for others as well. For that hope, and for an extraordinarily clear introduction to the issues, we are greatly indebted to Professor Knight.

Keywords: Jack Knight, empirical analysis, judicial decisionmaking, opinions, judges

JEL Classification: K10, K40