LINK to article on SSRN
ABSTRACT:
This contribution introduces a novel approach to study legal interactions, legal professions, and legal institutions, by combining argumentation, game theory and evolution. We consider a population of lawyers, having different postures, who engage in adversarial argumentation with other lawyers, obtaining outcomes according to the existing context and their chosen strategies. We examine the resulting games and analyse the evolution of the population.
European University Institute Working Paper Series
This new framework has enabled us to show that given certain hypotheses concerning the costs of proceeding, the most successful posture for a lawyer is to be non-honest and nonaggressive, followed by being honest and aggressive, then by being honest and non-aggressive, and finally by being non-honest and aggressive. In other words, given that framework, being non-honest pays only when one is non-aggressive, while aggressiveness only pays when coupled with honesty. We have also shown that by changing the external variable (in particular by reducing the costs of adversarial contest), dishonesty may lose its edge. Our dynamical analysis, while being still very preliminary, also leads to interesting results, such as the emergence (given a certain cost structure) of an environment where non-honest lawyers tend to prevail, followed by non-honest and aggressive ones, while the frequency of the honest and non-aggressive tends to decrease. More important, we the ideas presented in the present paper pave the way for future developments where AI and law can be combined not only with argumentation theory but also with legal sociology and (behavioural) economics.
Jeff Klenner Downloadable .pdf, Law Review Journal Article European University Institute, Game Theory, SSRN
”Balance is the key to quality judicial writing . . . because pride unrestrained can stiffen resistance, or even close the mind entirely, to helpful suggestions from others.”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1555959
Professor Abrams (University of Missouri School of Law) authors a column, Writing it Right, in Precedent, The Missouri Bar’s quarterly magazine. In a variety of contexts, the column stresses the fundamentals of quality legal writing – precision, conciseness, simplicity, and clarity
NOTE:
This article is adapted from Professor Abrams’ address to the international meeting of the Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions in Halifax, Nova Scotia on August 7, 2009.
Jeff Klenner Downloadable .pdf, Magazine Article Legal Writing
Benjamin J. Keele wrote this very important article featured in the February 2009 issue of the ABA’s Student Lawyer.
Many recent journal articles are online, and law professors are accustomed to posting working drafts on sites like the Social Science Research Network and Bepress. It is time to put law journals online, easily accessible to all, and to keep them online by preserving them in IRs (Institutional Repositories).
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1554399
While the download page is titled “Abstract”, this link appears to contain the full article.
Jeff Klenner Magazine Article ABA, Open Access, SSRN
From The Legal Workshop (Duke Law Journal):
http://tinyurl.com/yaqyrfb
By John Conley, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Law School
To study the performance of trial judges is to study public behavior and public documents. It is thus inherently doable, even if extraordinarily labor-intensive. Appellate judges, however, do most of their work in a secret world that is seemingly impenetrable to ethnographers or others who rely on direct observation. One can study only the judgments and opinions they are required to release to the public; the performance that underlies these carefully crafted documents is immune to scrutiny.
Jeff Klenner Law Review Journal Article Jurisprudence, The Legal Workshop