[2] The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is another publication that emphasizes the statistical analysis of law.
"[5]The first work on this topic is attributed to Nicolaus I Bernoulli in his doctoral dissertation De Usu Artis Conjectandi in Jure, written in 1709.
Specifically, jurimetrics uncover patterns in decision-making and use them to identify potential biases in judgements that are passed.
A synthesis of these fields is possible through the use of econometrics (statistics for economic analysis) and other quantitative methods to answer relevant legal matters.
As an example, the Columbia University scholar Edgardo Buscaglia published several peer-reviewed articles by using a joint jurimetrics and law and economics approach.
[6][7] In 2018, California's legislature passed Senate Bill 826, which requires all publicly held corporations based in the state to have a minimum number of women on their board of directors.
Using the binomial distribution, we may compute what the probability is of violating the rule laid out in Senate Bill 826 by the number of board members.
Suppose that instead of parity in general, the probability that a person who is qualified for board service is female is 40%; this is likely to be a high estimate, given the predominance of males in the technology industry.
Then the probability of violating Senate Bill 826 by chance may be recomputed as: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of screening tests to identify drug users on welfare, potential mass shooters,[39] and terrorists.
The sensitivity and specificity can be analyzed using concepts from the standard theory of statistical hypothesis testing: Therefore, the form of Bayes' theorem that is pertinent to us is:
We can examine several scenarios to see how well this hypothetical test works: With these base rates and the hypothetical values of sensitivity and specificity, we may calculate the posterior probability that a positive result indicates the individual will actually engage in each of the actions: Even with very high sensitivity and specificity, the screening tests only return posterior probabilities of 60.1% and 0.98% respectively for each action.
The problem with any screening procedure for rare events is that it is very likely to be too imprecise, which will identify too many people of being at risk of engaging in some undesirable action.
Jurimetrics utilizes many statistical methods to analyze judicial behavior, and this occurs through uncovering patterns in decision-making and using them to identify potential biases in judgements that are passed.
For instance, statistical analysis can forecast the outcomes of cases, providing insights into expected resolutions based on historical data.
[42] One example of an application of jurimetrics is through resource allocation within court systems, where data analytics are used to identify potential difficulties and suggests improvements.
These emphasize the role of jurimetrics in the legal system, as a way to bridge quantitative analysis, and equitable judicial processes.
Different values of the posterior probability, based on the prior odds and likelihood ratio, are computed in the following table: If we take
a criminal complaint or accusation, Bayes' theorem allows us to determine the conditional probability of a crime being committed.
They can review large amounts of case law, and identify patterns that assist in crafting legal arguments.
These innovations improve decision-making processes by reducing the likelihood of human error, but also increase the efficiency of legal research.
[43] For example, recent studies highlight the efficiency of ML in analyzing complex datasets, such as those found in healthcare or legal domains, with high accuracy.
Initially, jurimetrics was specifically focused on the theoretical exploration of statistical techniques on legal systems.
In the mid-20th century, jurimetrics began to gain traction as researchers continued to explore the field and its potential for improving legal analysis.
Early foundational studies created a roadmap for actually integrating the practice into the legal field.
By the late 20th century, jurimetrics expanded to include applications such as evaluating the reliability of forensic evidence and modeling litigation outcomes.
In today's world, jurimetrics is recognized as a tool for the modern day legal system.
In 2021, Abigail Z. Jacobs and Hanna Wallach released a study regarding "computational systems, and how they often involve unobservable theoretical constructs, such as socioeconomic status, teacher effectiveness, and risk of recidivism".
[46] "Computational systems have long been touted as having the potential to counter societal biases and structural inequalities, yet recent work has demonstrated that they often end up encoding and exacerbating them instead".
[46] An example of the ethical concerns in jurimetrics comes from risk assessment models used in the U.S. justice system, particularly seen in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool.
COMPAS is developed by Northpointe(now Equivant), and was built to evaluate a defendant's likelihood of recidivism through the analysis of various factors derived from official records and interviews.