Bob Lawless (Ill.) and Paul Stancil (Ill.) were kind enough to pass along the following quote:
"There has been a tendency on the one hand to deify and on the other to decry the results of tabulations of court business. It is easy to go to either extreme. More soundly, however, students of law administration are learning the proper function of such mass statistics in providing trustworthy facts, so far as they go, of court activities which may be used to verify, support, disprove, or suggest general hypotheses. The facts must be of such general nature as will lend themselves to average or mass verification, such as the nature of the general run of business in the courts, the character of the parties to the suit, the general methods of termination of cases, whether by court, jury or some other form of trial or by agreement or withdrawal and so on; but within these limits the facts may be definitely ascertained. Moreover, facts in themselves do not prove what should be the policy of law administration or the direction of reform therein. Their function is but to cast light upon the factors which should shape the rules of policy.”
What makes the quote particularly notable was that it comes from The American Law Institute, A Study of the Business of the Federal Courts (1934).
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