Tag: judging

The Art of Judging Art

The New York Times ran a fascinating article yesterday about lawsuits in which courts are asked to rule on the authenticity of works of art. Of course it is a rare judge or member of a jury who has any sort of experience expertise in such matters. So the cases become battles of experts, with the triers of fact “with no background in art” having to “arbitrate among experts who have devoted their lives to parsing a brush stroke.”

As the article points out, this is not, in itself, unusual. Medical malpractice cases are like that – judges and most jurors don’t know the first thing about what good medical practice is. So are a great many other cases. What is unusual is that the art world (buyers and sellers of works of art, and the intermediaries they employ) seems pretty much to ignore the courts’ judgments. The market, the articles says, is “a higher authority” than the courts; an artwork declared authentic by a judge or a jury can still be treated as a fake and go unsold for decades.

One explanation for this, provided by an “art law specialist” quoted by the Times is that “[i]n civil litigation the standard of proof is ‘more likely than not.’ Now picture yourself walking into a gallery and seeing a Picasso. You ask, ‘Did Picasso paint that?,’ and the dealer says, ‘Yes, more likely than not.’ You wouldn’t buy that.” The relevant community – the market – imposes a higher standard of proof (though the article doesn’t tell us which one – is it something like beyond a reasonable doubt, or perhaps an even heavier burden?), and a court judgment will not often meet it, because it is not designed to do so. (Judges, the article notes, are aware of this disconnect.)

Still, although the article does not focus on this, while the community as a whole may be able to ignore the pronouncements of ignorant or credulous judges and juries, the actual parties to the cases are not. If, say, a buyer sues a seller for fraud on the basis that the painting she bought is a fake, and the court finds that it is authentic, she has to live with the judgment, even though the art community may conclude that the judgment is mistaken. The buyer is then stuck with a valueless painting, and no remedy at all. In the same way, I suppose, doctors may think that a colleague of theirs has been unfairly found liable in a malpractice suit, and is actually a great professional and completely blameless in the case – but he still has to pay damages.

This is yet another reminder of the limits of the courts’ ability to grapple with the world’s complexity and to serve as an effective dispute-settling and/or truth-finding mechanism. Other areas in which these limits are manifest on which I have already blogged include foreign policy and emerging technologies. These limits are not necessarily a bad thing; no human institution is perfect. The good news is that we have a number of institutions trying to deal with difficult questions – courts, legislatures, the market, etc. – so we need not rely on just one of them.  Sometimes one will be better at dealing with questions of a particular type, so we can defer to its answer. The bad news is that sometimes it is not clear which is better, and indeed sometimes it is clear that none of them are very good at all (as I concluded was the case for new technologies). In the case of art, it is arguably better to live by the decentralized, collective wisdom of the art community than the necessarily uncertain and ignorant judgments of the courts. That collective wisdom is not infallible, but courts, it would seem, are even worse.

Googling Justice

Law review articles don’t make newspapers very often. But they do sometimes, as I noted in a post discussing the use of a certain four-letter word by Supreme Courts in the U.S. and Canada. Another example is a very interesting forthcoming paper by Allison Orr Larsen, of the William & Mary School of Law, called “Confronting Supreme Court Fact Finding,” which is the subject of a recent Washington Post story.

What seems to have piqued the Post‘s interest was the reference, in a fiery dissent by Justice Scalia in Arizona v. United States, to an newspaper article published after the oral argument in that case. The article was obviously not referred to by any of the submissions to the court. Justice Scalia, or one of his clerks, found it himself. Never mind the political controversy around Justice Scalia’s comments; “let’s … focus on a different lesson,” says the Post. “[U.S.] Supreme Court justices Google just like the rest of us.”

Indeed they do, writes prof. Larsen, and very frequently. She found more than 100 examples of judicial citations of sources not referred in the record in the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in the last 15 years; and such citations might be especially frequent in high-profile cases. While the rules of evidence require judges to keep to the evidence put to them by the parties, and appellate courts to the facts found at trial, for the “adjudicative facts” of a case – who did what, where, when, to whom, with what intention, etc. – these limits do not apply to “legislative facts” – general facts about the world or, more specifically, the social (and scientific) context in which legal rules operate.

As prof. Larsen notes, “[i]ndependent judicial research of legislative facts is certainly not a new phenomenon” (6). But new technologies are game-changers, because they make it so much easier. “Social science studies, raw statistics, and other data are all just a Google search away. If the Justices want more empirical support for a factual dimension of their argument, they can find it easily and without the help of anyone outside of the Supreme Court building” (6). If the parties (and interveners) to a case did not provide them with as much contextual information as they would have liked, judges used to have to rely on their own knowledge of the world, or guess, in order to figure out the context in which the rules they applied operated, and present their conclusion as, essentially, bald assertions. No longer. Now they can easily find what someone else has written on whatever topic interests them, and provide that person’s work as a source – an authority – for their assertions.

Prof. Larsen argues that this raises several problems, which the law at present fails to address. One is the risk of mistake. What if the information judges find is wrong or unreliable? Normally, we trust that the adversarial process will allow the parties to point out mistakes in the evidence submitted by their opponents. But if the judges engage in “in-house” fact-finding, there is no one to call them on the errors they might – and surely will – make. What makes the problem even worse is that human psychology and, possibly, technology, can conspire to make the results of judicial investigations biased. It is well-known that we tend to look (harder) for information that supports our hunches (rather) than for that which disproves it. But now, in addition, it is possible for search engine algorithms to supply us with information that suits our (likely) biases as inferred from our previous online activity. There is, apparently, debate over whether Google actually does this, but at least the possibility is there and ought to be worrying. Last but not least, in addition to the problems of error and bias, judicial reliance on “in-house” research is unfair to the parties, who have no notice of what the judges are doing and no opportunity to challenge their findings or even to address their concerns.

In fairness, it’s not as if the old common sense, logic, and bald assertion way of “finding” legislative facts were problem-free. Perhaps, at some point in the past, their experience as litigators was sufficient to teach future judges all they needed to know about the world (though that’s very doubtful). It surely isn’t anymore (as I wrote, for example, here). And bald assertions of judicial common sense are hardly less unfair to the parties, or less affected by bias (class bias for example), than their autonomous research. I don’t know if it is possible to establish with any sort of confidence whether the problems the new resources at the judges’ disposal are creating are worse than those they are displacing. But perhaps it is worth trying.

Another thing I don’t know is whether these problems might be less acute in Canada than they are in the United States. I don’t have any hard numbers, but my impression is that our Supreme Court might cite fewer problematic sources for its legislative-fact-finding. It often relies on the governmental studies, which I suppose are easily available to the parties and surely are (or really, really ought to be) part of the record. I may be wrong about this though. That would be a feasible study, and an interesting one to undertake, but for now, I do not have the time to do so. I would love to hear from those in the know though, former Supreme Court clerks for example.

The Best and the Rest

A friend has drawn my attention to what seems like an interesting book, Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law by Allan C. Huntchinson, a professor at Osgoode Hall. I haven’t had a chance to start reading it yet but I will eventually, because prof. Hutchinson’s topic is directly relevant to my doctoral dissertation’s topic – judges and the way in which they shape the law. But while my idea is that such a study has to start with systemic factors – the ways in which the environment in which judges work (generally accepted ideas of what a judge ought to do, the institution of courts, rules of procedure) constrain them and influence their work, the sources of the rules judges apply, the differences of the judges’ approaches to various areas of the law – prof. Hutchinson’s study is about individuals.

As the blurb on the publisher’s website says, “[a]ny effort to understand how law works has to take seriously its main players – judges. Like any performance, judging should be evaluated by reference to those who are its best exponents.” The book is about “candidates for a judicial hall of fame,” “game changers who oblige us to rethink what it is to be a good judge” – starting with Lord Mansfield, and on to mostly predictable greats such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lord Atkin, and Lord Denning. The only Canadian in the list is Justice Bertha Wilson.

As I wrote here a while ago, “judicial greatness, as greatness in anything else, is probably impossible to define in any way that would not generate serious disagreement. But that’s precisely what makes trying to define it, and coming up with lists of greats, so entertaining.” So I’m sure that a book trying to understand judicial work by defining and selecting case studies of judicial greatness was good fun to work on, and has the potential of being good fun to read. And yet I wonder if it is a profitable way of achieving its stated aim of understanding how the law works.

That’s because I doubt that “any performance …  should be evaluated by” looking at the best performers. For one thing, understanding any human activity is, arguably, a study in mediocrity more than in greatness. If you want to understand tennis, it is not enough to watch Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal. That will teach you how it ought to be done, but tells you nothing at all about how tennis is in fact played by everyone else on the planet. And the point is starker still if we leave the realm of activities that are pursued primarily for the sake of excellence, such as competitive sports and performing arts. Other activities – think of cooking for example – are mostly pursued not for the sake of excellence, but in order to satisfy some practical need. By studying examples of excellence in such activities, one does not even learn what people who undertake them typically aim for, even in their dreams, still less what they usually achieve.  Judging is like that. Its primary purpose is not to achieve greatness, but simply to settle disputes, many of them quite trivial. A lot of it happens every day, most of it good enough to do the job, but by no means remarkable. Studying great judges tells you little descriptively about what judging usually is, and perhaps not much normatively about what it ought to be.

The other point that any study of a human activity through the examination of its outstanding representatives misses is the rule-bound nature of most human undertakings. To return to my tennis example again, a book about it surely has got to start with a description of the rules of the game, not with the biographies of great players. Of course you might be able to figure out some (in the case of tennis, probably most) of the rules by watching great matches, but understanding the rules of the game first will help you appreciate and understand what is going on and what is so great about it. You will also need some understanding of the means at the players’ disposal  – their equipment, say, or even the human body. Suppose you’re an alien with teleportation abilities who doesn’t understand how human beings move around. Chances are you won’t admire Rafa Nadal’s running – you’ll think he’s an idiot. It is a rather convoluted example, but when it comes to judging, we are to some extent in the position of that alien. Most legal thinkers seem not to have much of an appreciation for the rules of the judicial game or for the limits the judges’ position imposes on what they can do. Of course these rules are controversial and these limits are uncertain. But it seems to me that a truly informative study of judging has to begin by discussing them.

There is of course a danger in methodological critiques such as this one. Instead of engaging with the story a scholar tells, the critic in effect tells him that he ought to have written a different kind of story, which (almost) invariably happens to be just the kind of story the critic himself is working on. That’s exactly what I’ve done here. Yet if that caveat is right, then perhaps there us substantive value in my criticism, despite its dubious and self-serving methodology!