Page 144 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 135

to be used as legal research tools, or will they assume some quasi-positivist
status in the hands of research science operating outside the domain?
As it turns out, results prove favourable to existing practice: calculation of
a final composite value (CV) for each case, which can be compared against the
cut-off criteria for decision in favour of a ―right to counsel‖, showed
remarkable consistency against existing decisions. ―It appears that, in at least
the area of judicial review, quantitative analysis discloses a consistency of
Court action concealed in conventional qualitative interpretation‖ [1957].
The meta-indicative role of numerical procedures is increasingly common
in legal practice. Court procedures and client billing actions are typically
coded as a pattern or set of case features in numbered notations, that match
individual cases or actions against a set of common factors, which can be used
to produce complex results, for example for the purposes of management of
individual and collective case development. Such methods often have no
explicit equivalent in verbal logic, at least in any efficient or comprehensive
form.
Questions of legal ethnography, although implicit, are hardly discussed in
this early paper, but are erased by those of public policy in sensitive and
publicised jurisdictions. Their oversight, however, is not optional for issues of
policy. However, Kort, as research scientist, does not clearly acknowledge his
audience nor even attempt discourse with legal professionals. True, at first he
refers to legal opinion in order initially to establish what he terms the major
categories of pivotal factors (pv). Kort relies on his own reading and analysis
of formal sources of professional and expert knowledge, in the form of
published cases, and appears not to survey ―generally accepted notions‖ of
professionals in selecting factors. He divides his selected cases into source and
test groups: yet no criterion is offered for the selection of cases into two
groups, a source and test group.
Yet the next step of his procedure is distinctly quantitative - the
assignment of numeric values to factors, prior to any calculations. A linear,
positive scale is adopted, assigning a higher number to a factor on the basis of
two conditions: the factor must have disadvantaged the petitioner adversely in
his criminal trial, and secondly, the factor must contribute to a reversal of
conviction by the Supreme Court. The same scale is to be used for single
factors, or combinations of factors. Higher values attributed to factors indicate
its contribution to uncertainty in State decisions. Near zero values mean that a
―fair trial‖ has taken place. The inclusion of the key algorithm, used and
published by Kort to compare and rank cases based on numerical values,
seems intended for a specialist, sociometric audience.