Via Dan
Ernst: Brophy on Quantitative
Legal History—Empirics and the Rule of Law in the Antebellum Judiciary, on
“The Legal Workshop” website of the Duke Law Journal.
From the introduction:
This symposium asks how we can quantify and evaluate what
judges do. Some of the papers are
skeptical of attempts at quantification. These questions are of importance to
legal historians, who frequently seek to link judicial behavior to larger
cultural, economic, and political trends.
This essay suggests some ways that one might quantify and thus measure
an important and central issue for legal historians: how did appellate judges
define, work with, and alter the “rule of law”?