I tried to post this in the thread yesterday, but I'm having some technical difficulties. This is a response to TGGP's link to a Volohk blog post in response to Caplan's critique of law as a "phony" discipline:
TGGP, you finally got me to click on a link. I think some of the commentors (one in particular) nailed it. Law Professors tend not to run experiments and report results. They tend not even to look for natural experiments by perusing historical data. It really is a shame that one can become a distinguished law professor without ever taking a math or statistics course. I think that's at the heart of what makes the legal academia phony. That and a focus on interpretation of legal texts, rather than crafting of administrative and regulatory rules.
To be fair, the legal profession has been trying to become more empirical before anybody notices.
But there are heavy legacy costs to preserving status for the non-quantitively literate legal academic elites in the face of a takeover of the social sciences generally by applied mathematicians (a development that favors status advancement for economists, epidemiologists, and demographers).
A great example of an overextended legal academic wilting in the presence of an actual domain expert on a topic is Dershowitz debating Finkelstein about his book on Goodman's Democracy Now radio show.
Dershowitz's reliance on arguments rather than deep research in the book The Case For Israel was excrutiatingly exposed by Finkelstein there over a couple hours.
As I've posted, law has the potential to be a legitimate academic discipline, but it needs to be rooted in empiricism, and it can't rely winks to majoritarianism or Oakshotte/Burke conservatism to prop up its passivity with regard to the mythologies, repugnancy biases, and commission/omission biases that prop up vast swaths of laws and legal norms as they currently exist.
Law should be to sociology what mechanical engineering is to physics: a transparent consequentialist bridge from the study of natural phenomena to desired outcomes.
To be fair, there are law professors who treat the law like this now. But the discipline lacks comprehensive reform and these law professors lack something approaching hegemonic institutional power.
These are of course my personal observations and intuitions. Like all posts, I'm not claiming this is expert analysis rooted in careful, methodical study of the issue.
For curious readers, the comment HA is referring to in the Volokh thread is here. I was amused to see other commenters there referring to John Hasnas' "Myth of the Rule of Law", which I had also mentioned here before.
You expect (or want) our new knowledge about biases and whatnot to change features of the law that seemed intuitive or obvious when they were first laid down. Have you read Greene & Cohen's For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything? If so, what did you think?
I suppose I should try to find that Dershowitz debate, though "Democracy Now" is just the kind of title that would repel me.
I saw the pushback of verbalists against quantitative imperialism recently in a GNXP thread where Mencius was encouraging John Emerson (who is at the opposite end of the spectrum politically) to gang up against Razib in insistence that history be literary rather than aping the natural sciences and/or using cliometrics. I of course am on the other side, possibly due to my own irrational dislike of the verbally gifted.
Posted by: TGGP | January 01, 2009 at 10:00 AM
There's a transcript of the Dershowitz-Finkelstein debate at DN, and though I've only gotten to the Joan Peters stuff so far, it's amusing:
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/9/24/scholar_norman_finkelstein_calls_professor_alan
Posted by: TGGP | January 01, 2009 at 10:16 AM