Judicial Decisionmaking

Catalog description

What decides legal cases? One obvious answer is: the law. Judges apply the law to the facts of a case and an answer presents itself. This understanding of how law and the judicial process work may be true in many cases, but it is not true in all of them. What other factors are in play? Social scientists have sought to explain judicial decisionmaking by reference to a variety of non-legal factors, including judges, personal characteristics, their caseloads and other relationships. The social scientific study of courts raises a host of interesting questions. This course marries social science literature and the questions it raises to a set of normative problems in the law.