Abstract
Response to Chad Oldfather, Joseph Bockhorst, and Brian Dimmer, Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness
In Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship, Chad Oldfather, Joseph Bockhorst, and Brian Dimmer initiate a provocative dialogue about measuring judicial responsiveness by providing innovative tools for assessing how closely judicial opinions hew to the arguments and information provided by litigants. The authors’ primary objective is to assess the effectiveness of using computational methods of textual analysis to measure judicial responsiveness to the arguments and authorities presented by litigants. Drawing upon the cases decided by the First Circuit in 2004, the authors identified cases for which the court issued opinions and briefs from both parties were electronically available. The authors used a sample of thirty cases from this population to test the validity of responsiveness measures.
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