In a move that will strike many court scholars (and, likely, others as well) as verging on the "unbelievable" (in the literal sense of the word), according to emerging news reports (e.g, here) the French Government has now "banned the publication of statistical information about judges’ decisions–with a five year prison sentence set as the maximum punishment for anyone who breaks the new law." The new french law (Art. 33 of France's Justice Reform Act) makes clear that "[t]he identity data of magistrates and members of the judiciary cannot be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analysing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.” (translated; emphasis added)
According to news accounts, the new french law targets "legal tech companies focused on litigation prediction and analytics–from publicly revealing the pattern of judges’ behaviour in relation to court decisions." That said, the implications for empirical legal scholars seeking to model judicial decisions, certainly at the individual judge-level, in France are obvious.
While empirical legal scholars seeking to analyze U.S. judicial decisions face bothersome "hurdles" when it comes to linking judge names and their published decisions (e.g., a long-standing AO policy that strips judge names/IDs from most publicly-available AO data sets), I am unaware of anything in the U.S. that comes close to what the French Government seeks to accomplish with its new law.
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