文档介绍：Statistical and Economic Approaches to Legal History
(ing in UNIV. OF ILL. L. REV. (2002))
Daniel Klerman
USC Law and Economics & Law and Public Policy
Research Paper No. 02-6
LAW AND ECONOMICS
RESEARCH PAPER SERIES
Sponsored by the John M. Olin Foundation
University of Southern California Law School
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0071
This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science work
electronic library at http://papers./abstract_id=337500
4/11/2002 4:44 PM

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 munity, 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 history—the 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 plement current meth-
ods—each method contributing its own insights and pensat-
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
las