Independent Legal Scholar Resources

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

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

ORIGINALISM IS BUNK

By Mitchell Berman in the New York University Law Review, courtesy of LegalWorkshop.org:

“The upshot is not that constitutional interpretation should disregard the Framers’ intentions, ratifiers’ understandings, or original public meanings.  Of course we should care about these things.  But we can take the original character of the Constitution seriously without treating it as dispositive.  That original intents and meanings matter is not enough to render originalism true.”

Jeff Klenner Law Review Journal Article Constitutional Law