The empirical gap in jurisprudence : a comprehensive study of the Supreme Court of Canada / Daved Muttart.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-254) and index.

Use copy Restrictions unspecified star MiAaHDL

Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. MiAaHDL

http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212

digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL

Print version record.

Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Section I. Setting the Stage -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Possible Solutions: Case Study of the Supreme Court of Canada -- 3 Beginning to Close the Empirical Gap -- Section II. Measuring the Court�s Decisions -- 4 Fact, Law, and Policy -- 5 Modes of Legal Reasoning -- 6 Changing the Law -- 7 Other Trends: Bright Lines to Principles -- 8 Judicial Attitudes and Other Interesting Findings -- 9 Charter Cases Are Different -- Section III. Testing Theories

10 How Judges Judge: Testing Legal Theory11 Is Legal Reasoning Autonomous? -- 12 Is the Supreme Court of Canada �Too� Activist? -- 13 Conclusion: The Gap Has Been Narrowed -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z

In jurisprudential writing, single decisions are often held up as representative without any evidence to support their representative claims. In order to address this problem, Daved Muttart has made a systematic study encompassing every judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1950 and 2003.Examining almost 5000 cases, Muttart analyses these Supreme Court decisions employing several important criteria including whether the decisions overruled prior precedent, the extent to which they were decided on fact, law, or policy, and the legal and extra-legal modes of reasoning utilized by the Court. Muttart uses the results of this systematic examination to test the validity of extant jurisprudential theories. Ultimately, he concludes that the Court's method of operation is evolving as it moves into a new century. While the court's reasoning is becoming less foundational, it remains a predominantly legal, as opposed to political, institution.Filling an important niche in the study of jurisprudence, The Empirical Gap in Jurisprudence demonstrates that systematic studies based on large samples of cases will yield many insights that were obfuscated by prior efforts that relied on small and self-selected samples.

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide