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Statements posted on this blog represent the views of individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Law Science & Innovation (which does not take positions on policy issues) or of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law or Arizona State University.

Going to law school because “I’m not good at math or science” is no longer sustainable.

TEACHING STATISTICS IN LAW SCHOOLS

(By Nathan A. Schachtman, Esq.)

Courtesy of Kirk Hartley

Back in 2011, I came across a blog post about a rumor of a trend in law school education to train law students in quantitative methods. Sasha Romanosky, “Two Law School RumorsConcurring Opinions (Jan. 20, 2011). Of course, the notion that that quantitative methods and statistics would become essential to a liberal and a professional education reaches back to the 19th century. Holmes famously wrote that:
“For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of Law” 10 Harvard Law Rev. 457 (1897). A few years later, H.G. Wells expanded the pre-requisite from lawyering to citizenship, generally:
“The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.”
Herbert George Wells, Mankind in the Making 204 (1903).
Certainly, there have been arguments made that statistics and quantitative analyses more generally should be part of the law school curriculum. See, e.g., Yair Listokin, “Why Statistics Should be Mandatory for Law Students” Prawfsblawg (May 22, 2006); Steven B. Dow, “There’s Madness in the Method: A Commentary on Law, Statistics, and the Nature of Legal Education,” 57 Okla. L. Rev. 579 (2004).
Judge Richard Posner has described the problem in dramatic Kierkegaardian terms of “fear and loathing.”Jackson v. Pollion, 733 F.3d 786, 790 (7th Cir. 2013). Stopping short of sickness unto death, Judge Posner catalogued the “lapse,” at the expense of others, in the words of judges and commentators:
“This lapse is worth noting because it is indicative of a widespread, and increasingly troublesome, discomfort among lawyers and judges confronted by a scientific or other technological issue. “As a general matter, lawyers and science don’t mix.” Peter Lee, “Patent Law and the Two Cultures,” 120 Yale L.J. 2, 4 (2010); see also Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., ___ U.S. ___, 133 S.Ct. 2107, 2120, (2013) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief”); Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 599 (1993) (Rehnquist, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (‘‘the various briefs filed in this case … deal with definitions of scientific knowledge, scientific method, scientific validity, and peer review—in short, matters far afield from the expertise of judges’’); Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America v. United States, 320 U.S. 1, 60–61 (1943) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting in part) (‘‘it is an old observation that the training of Anglo–American judges ill fits them to discharge the duties cast upon them by patent legislation’’); Parke–Davis & Co. v. H.K. Mulford Co., 189 F. 95, 115 (S.D.N.Y. 1911) (Hand, J.) (‘‘I cannot stop without calling attention to the extraordinary condition of the law which makes it possible for a man without any knowledge of even the rudiments of chemistry to pass upon such questions as these … . How long we shall continue to blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some such advance’’); Henry J. Friendly, Federal Jurisdiction: A General View 157 (1973) (‘‘I am unable to perceive why we should not insist on the same level of scientific understanding on the patent bench that clients demand of the patent bar, or why lack of such understanding by the judge should be deemed a precious asset’’); David L. Faigman, Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in Law xi (1999) (‘‘the average lawyer is not merely ignorant of science, he or she has an affirmative aversion to it’’).
Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse for the ordinary citizen[1]. Ignorance of science and math should be no excuse for the ordinary judge or lawyer.
In the 1960s, Michael Finkelstein introduced a course on statistics and probability into the curriculum of the Columbia Law School. The class has had an unfortunate reputation of being “difficult.” One year, when Prof. Finkelstein taught the class at Yale Law School, the students petitioned him not to give a final examination. Apparently, the students were traumatized by facing problems that actually have right and wrong answers! Michael O. Finkelstein, “Teaching Statistics to Law Students,” in L. Pereira-Mendoza, L.S. Kea, T.W.Kee, & W.K. Wong, eds., I Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Teaching Statistics at 505 (1998).
Law school is academia’s “last clear chance” to avoid having statistically illiterate lawyers running amok. Do law schools take advantage of the opportunity? For the most part, understanding statistical concepts is not required for admission to, or for graduation from, law school. Some law schools helpfully offer courses to address the prevalent gap in statistics education at the university level. [See Schachtman’s list of law schools that offer classes related to statistics education here.)