Empirical Analysis

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84.2
Reconsidering Substantive Canons
Anita S. Krishnakumar
Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law

I owe deep thanks for valuable insights and conversations to Aaron-Andrew Bruhl, William N. Eskridge, Abbe R. Gluck, Rebecca M. Kysar, Margaret H. Lemos, Katherine Shaw, Lawrence Solan, Nelson Tebbe, and Adam Zimmerman. I am especially indebted to my husband, Ron Tucker, for his patience with this project. Special thanks to Dean Michael A. Simons and St. John’s University School of Law for generous research assistance and to participants at workshops and colloquia at Yale Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law for their comments on earlier drafts of this Article. Christina Corcoran, Sade Forte, Ilya Mordukhaev, Jennifer Roseman, Samuel Sroka, Rita Wang, Kim Friedman, Lissa Yang, Peter Ryan, Vince Nibali, Christine Sammarco, and Thomas Combs provided terrific research assistance. Thanks also to the editors at The University of Chicago Law Review for their excellent work. All errors are my own.

There is a popular belief among statutory interpretation scholars that substantive canons of statutory construction—that is, policy-based background norms or presumptions such as the rule of lenity and the canon of constitutional avoidance—act as an “escape valve” that helps textualist judges eschew, or “mitigate,” the rigors of textualism.
Empirical Analysis Statutory Interpretation Substantive Canons
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84.1
Qualitative Methods for Law Review Writing
Katerina Linos
Professor of Law and Faculty Co-director, Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
Melissa Carlson
PhD Student, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

We are extremely grateful to Catherine Albiston, Lauren Edelman, Stavros Gadinis, David Lieberman, Aila Matanock, Alison Post, Kevin Quinn, Karen Tani, and participants at the Berkeley Law Faculty Workshop for their generous comments.

I.  Imagining Alternatives and Identifying a Puzzle

Best Practices Empirical Analysis Legal Profession
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84.1
The Concepts of Law
Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Professor of International Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, The University of Chicago Law School
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

Thanks to John Gerring, Brian Leiter, Saul Levmore, Simone Sepe, and Lawrence Solum for superb comments.

I.  A Primer on Conceptualization and Measurement

A.    Concepts and Conceptualization

Best Practices Empirical Analysis Public Choice
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84.1
Making Doctrinal Work More Rigorous: Lessons from Systematic Reviews
William Baude
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School
Adam S. Chilton
Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School
Anup Malani
Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

I.  The Case for Increased Rigor

We begin by surveying unsystematic claims about the state of legal doctrine, then go on to explain why, even if the claims are true, there are still benefits to more systematic review.

A.    Examples

Best Practices Empirical Analysis
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84.1
Searching for the Common Law: The Quantitative Approach of the Restatement of Consumer Contracts
Oren Bar-Gill
William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law and Economics, Harvard Law School

For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank Lewis Kornhauser, Richard Revesz, participants in The University of Chicago Law Review’s symposium on “Developing Best Practices for Legal Analysis,” and participants in the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts project.

Omri Ben-Shahar
Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, The University of Chicago Law School
Florencia Marotta-Wurgle
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Introduction

Applying a precedent is the fundamental craft of a common-law judge. Judges do not go back to general principles to derive novel solutions to each case at hand, along with novel justifications and renewed persuasion efforts.

Best Practices Consumer Law Contract Law Empirical Analysis

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