Experts often seek to apply social science to the facts of a particular case. Sometimes experts link social science findings to cases using only their expert judgment, and other times experts conduct case-specific research using social science principles and methods to produce case-specific evidence. This article addresses the scientific and legal merits of these two approaches and argues for the use of methodologically rigorous case-specific research to produce “social facts,” or case-specific evidence derived from social science principles. We explain the many ways that social fact studies can be conducted to yield reliable case-specific opinions, and we seek to dispel the view that litigation poses insurmountable barriers to the conduct of case-specific empirical research. We conclude that social fact studies are feasible for both plaintiffs and defendants, with or without special access to the parties involved in a case, and provide much sounder conclusions about the relevance of social science to a litigated case than do alternatives based on expert judgment.
Our perceptions of what we owe each other turn somewhat on whether we consider “another” to be “an other”—a stranger and not a friend. In this essay...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...
Although ethical critiques of markets are longstanding, modern academic debates about the “moral limits of markets” (MLM) tend to be fairly limited in...
Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...
Legal ethicists, advocacy groups, and politicians have called for greater restrictions on the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when parties...
In recent years, the federal courts have seen a plethora of lawsuits originated by states challenging federal government actions. As a result, there...
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
This Essay reports data on the impact of Bruen and its predecessor, Heller, on gun rights cases. Put mildly, the impact was substantial, not only in...
In this paper we investigate whether gender is associated with the content of judicial opinions in the U.S. courts of appeals. Using a topic model...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former President Donald Trump on June 8, 2023, on multiple criminal charges related to classified documents...