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Authors : 1. Frederick Schauer,
David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Virginia
2. Barbara A. Spellman,
Professor of Law
University of Virginia
Calibrating Legal Judgments
Objective: to study the notion and essence of legal judgments calibration, the possibilities of using it in the law-enforcement activity; to explore the expenses and advantages of using it.
Methods: dialectic approach to the cognition of social phenomena, which enables to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the integrity of objective and subjective factors; it determined the choice of the following research methods: formal-legal, comparative legal, sociological, methods of cognitive psychology and philosophy.
Results: In ordinary life, people who assess other people›s judgments typically take into account the other judgments of those they are assessing in order to calibrate the judgment presently being assessed. The restaurant and hotel rating website TripAdvisor is exemplary, because it facilitates calibration by providing access to a rater›s previous ratings. Such information allows a user to see whether a particular rating comes from a rater who is enthusiastic about every place she patronizes, or instead from someone who is incessantly hard to please. And even when less systematized, as in assessing a letter of recommendation or college transcript, calibration by recourse to the decisional history of those whose judgments are being assessed is ubiquitous.
Yet despite the ubiquity and utility of such calibration, the legal system seems perversely to reject it. Appellate courts do not openly adjust their standard of review based on the previous judgments of the judge whose decision they are reviewing, nor do judges in reviewing legislative or administrative decisions, magistrates in evaluating search warrant representations, or jurors in assessing witness perception. In most legal domains, calibration by reference to the prior decisions of the reviewee is invisible, either because it does not exist or because reviewing bodies are unwilling to admit using what they in fact know and employ.
Scientific novelty: for the first time, the work substantiates that law is reluctant to take account of the past decisions of the individuals and institutions they are reviewing. By looking only at the particular decision under review, and not calibrating the posture of review on the basis of a history of decisions, reviewing courts and other reviewing institutions embody the particularism that is a large part of the American legal tradition.
Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific and educational activity when viewing the issues of legal judgments calibration.
Keywords :
Legal judgments calibration; Legal judgment; Legal bodies; Courts
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Original publication: https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/1/125/2528263
Citation :
Schauer F., Spellman B. A. Calibrating Legal Judgments, Actual Problems of Economics and Law, 2017, vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 208–226. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21202/1993-047X.11.2017.3.208-226
Type of article : The scientific article
Date of receipt of the article :
12.07.2017
Date of adoption of the print :
28.08.2017
Date of online accommodation :
25.09.2017
