An Anthropological Approach to Judging
March 24th, 2010
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.