Judicial analytics and the great transformation of American Law

Abstract

Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. Judicial analytics can assess extra-legal factors that influence decisions. Behavioral anomalies in judicial decision-making offer an intuitive understanding of feature relevance, which can then be used for debiasing the law. A conceptual distinction between inter-judge disparities in predictions and inter-judge disparities in prediction accuracy suggests another normatively relevant criterion with regards to fairness. Predictive analytics can also be used in the first step of causal inference, where the features employed in the first step are exogenous to the case. Machine learning thus offers an approach to assess bias in the law and evaluate theories about the potential consequences of legal change.

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

“…6 Determining the physiological mechanisms through which this happens is beyond the scope of our paper. 7 Outdoor conditions could in principle affect the output of the subject even if he never went outside and was exposed to it. For example, if external temperature is very high, he might not venture outside during breaks "for fresh air."…”

“…However the scheduling of files within the day is done many months in advance and therefore unrelated to temperature realizations. 7 There is also research on the effect of ambient temperature on a variety of animal behaviors. We do not survey it here.…”

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

“…Most decisions of referees in professional sports are made very quickly, almost by reflex or intuition. 7 Judicial decisions, on the other hand, 4 Weinshall-Margel and Shaphard (2011) raised issues about the randomness of the order in which the cases are seen by judges and the timing of the meal breaks. See also the response of Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso (2011b).…”

“…See, for example, Lim, Syder, and Strömberg (2015) and Philippe and Ouss (2016) for the relationship between media coverage of crime and sentencing decisions. 7 Racial biases in similarly quick and consequential decisions are analyzed in other domains as well. For example, Correll et al (2002Correll et al ( , 2007 used subjects, ranging from police officers to college students to random members of a community, in videogame-like simulations.…”

Judicial analytics on trial: An assessment of legal analytics in judicial systems in light of the right to a fair trial

“…Legal Analytics may be employed by parties, for example to anticipate the outcome of the (potential) case, 36 or by judges, for example to anticipate how the potential judgment would stand in the context of case law. 37 It is considered that Legal Analytics may increase efficiency, 38 fairness of law, 39 and contribute to the quality of legal and administrative decisions. Human rights organizations and scholars could employ it to scrutinise the fairness of judgments.…”