Abstract:
The honour of introducing Jurimetrics into the legal research is undoubtedly accredited to eminent jurist Lee Loevinger. Jurimetrics involves a scientific enquiry which ultimately targets at establishing predictable patterns in the field of law. Scholars perceived the need to incorporate scientific methods of enquiry or experimental jurisprudence into the field of legal research so that scientific data could be used to ascertain legal issues. Justice Holmes remarked that, “the man of the future is the man of statistics”, thereby concluding scientific enquiry as an indispensable part of legal research. It is pertinent to establish the distinction between jurisprudence and jurimetrics. Jurisprudence deals with the philosophy of law whereas jurimetrics is concerned with the quantitative analysis of the judicial patterns. Every law school teaches jurisprudence as a core subject but jurimetrics is ignored. Lee Loesvinger opines that jurimetrics is not reckoned because of the gap that exists between those who practice jurisprudence and those who practice science. It is high time to bridge the gap and introduce scientific enquiry into the field of law. Data driven scientific enquiry has been adopted as a teaching methodology for majority of the subjects but not for law. As the legal education has undergone a paradigm shift, we the Faculty of Law, must teach students what they should know than teaching what we know. This paper focuses on the reasons as to why and how jurimetrics could be introduced in the curriculum of law schools.
Speaker:
Prof. Hema.K, Assistant Professor, School of Law, Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore