Research report 2016 - Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

What do judges have to count (on)? Empirical realities in the legal system

Authors
Hamann, Hanjo
Departments
Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Gemeinschaftsgütern, Bonn
Summary
In Continental Europe, traditional legal thinking is rather remote from empirical research and statistics. Nonetheless lawyers have been trying for more than one hundred years to fuse knowledge about society’s “is’s and oughts”. Their attempts had to continuously adapt to changes in the dominant intellectual paradigms, and are now framed as discursive argumentation about different normatively infused descriptions of the world. As such, empirical discourse is indispensable for the law and will shape legal education in the future. Complex legal realities require statistical legal thinking.

For the full text, see the German version.

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