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STATISTICAL AND ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO LEGAL HISTORY

Source: home.law.uiuc.edu
Topic: Economic History

Sort Desciption: economic and statistical analysis in legal history and shows how use ... Ron Harris The Encounters of Economic History and Legal History 21 L ...

Content Inside: K LERMAN . DOC 2/20/2003 4:27 PM 1167 STATISTICAL AND ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO LEGAL HISTORY Daniel Klerman* Professor Klerman advocates increased use of economic and statistical approaches by legal historians. He documents the dearth of economic and statistical analysis in legal history and shows how use of these methods could contribute to the field. Professor Klerman shows these potential benefits by examining recent articles which use economics and statistics to explore the determinants and effects of le- gal change. This article advances a simple hypothesis: legal history could bene- fit from more attention to economics and statistics. Legal historians cur- rently make remarkably little use of economic theory and statistical tests. Scholars outside the legal history community most notably economists however have begun to use rational choice theory and regression analy- sis to investigate issues which are at the core of legal historythe causes of legal change and the effect of legal change on behavior. Legal history would be enriched if historians took note of these new methods. Eco- nomics and statistics cannot of course replace the methods currently in use but when used appropriately they can complement current meth- odseach method contributing its own insights and partially compensat- ing for the weaknesses of the others. The relative neglect of economics and statistics may reflect misper- ceptions of these fields both of which have changed dramatically in the last two decades. For example legal historians may reject economic analysis because they view it as theoretical and abstract as politically conservative or as naively functionalist. While each of these claims might have been true twenty years ago they are largely false today. Part of the goal of this article is to bring to light more recent trends in eco- nomics which have made it more empirical less functionalist less politi- cally charged and thus more relevant to legal history. * Profess ...

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