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Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 143

Kort holds out the possibility of a radical subjectivity and phenomenology
being accommodated in legal domains by appropriate aids, and that statistical
and graphical methods can model the associative reasoning actually employed
by lawyers, as opposed to the more discursive representation of logical
reasoning of legal texts.
Research in this instance does not necessitate law reform, neither does it
offer an available tool for professional use. As with visual imagery, the limited
application of Kort‘s work can be credited in part to its early timing. But what
if the results had been well published, and manifestly contradicted practice?
What if statistical method contradicted conventional verbalism? Should such
numeric data be available as feedback, to legislators and lawyers, even as
feedback in court, as part of decisions? How would it then be interpreted?
Such feedback should not only provide data for policy changes. Directly or
indirectly it should comprise self-monitoring of heuristic and communicative
behaviour by the judicial subjects of its study. Any presumption of objectivity
or truth claims of its content and independence of its author would be
qualified, if such feedback provided close control and modification, in the
temporal and spatial sequences of actual decision making. What judicial
training would such close and immediate feedback presume? What technology
or mathematical procedures would ensure more dynamic and widespread use
of statistics? If this data is an heuristic map of legal inference, what are the
jurisprudential consequences of its use? Can it supply the retrospective
explanation of reasons required for judgment? Can its method be fully
articulated and ethnographically understood by its subjects? Can the subject of
this research be reflexively and creatively owned by its professional and client
subject?
Kort‘s studies, we have said, can at the very least be regarded as exciting
and necessary explorations of Peircean Firsts-in-Seconds in a modern cultural
domain. He explains how determining instrumental procedures involves
hypothetical thinking and polysemic interpretation; how the law is continually
recreated as it is judged; how close subjectivist and realist themes are.
Kevelson was intensely interested in such analysis, yet always within the
overall ―structure of indeterminate situations‖, of the creative and ―chaotic‖
qualities of legal practice and dialogic exchange, which can be identified with
the Peircean category of Thirdness. Yet Kort never fully achieved such
dialogic exchange within the law community. Kort was not a lawyer and was
almost proud of the distance of himself and his methods from his subject
matter. Kevelson would have rejected any conventional objectivity of
researcher and subject, especially one framed by legal technology. ―The initial