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1 Russell R. Wheeler, Empirical Research and the Politics of Judicial Administration: Creating the Federal Judicial Center 31 (1988)

handle is hein.congcourts/ereasec0001 and id is 1 raw text is: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH AND THE POLITICS OF JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION: CREATING THE FEDERAL JUDICIAL CENTER RUSSELL WHEELER* I INTRODUCTION Throughout the twentieth century, a vocal minority of law teachers, social scientists, judges, and lawyers have produced legal procedure scholarship and exhortation honoring Lord Kelvin's maxim: When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory. This article is about that tradition, but not of that tradition. It differs from articles in this symposium that draw hypotheses and seek to disprove them by repeated observations. It is, rather, a case study of the creation of the Federal Judicial Center,2 the federal courts' research and education agency and an important contributor to empiricism in civil procedure. This article indicates that changes in court organization, including changes to promote quantitative research, are likely to reflect developments in the larger environment of which the courts are a part. It highlights some characteristics about the politics of empirical research on procedure. It suggests that numerous interests seek to control internal research activity within the judicial branch. Beyond these points, the episodes of judicial lobbying that this article reveals remind us that predictions of human behavior, the ultimate goal of social science empirical theory, are always subject to the influence of fortuitous circumstances-chance always plays a role. II QUANTITATIVE PROCEDURE RESEARCH IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Efforts to measure the effect of legal and procedural rules date back at least to the Progressive Era at the turn of the century, an era dominated by Copyright © 1988 by law and Contemporary Problems * Director, Division of Special Educational Services, Federal Judicial Center. 1. Quoted in C. PRITCHErr, THE ROOSEVELT COURT, A STUDY INJUDICIAL POLIICS AND VALUES, 1937-1947, at xi (1948). 2. The research derives from a request in the late 1970's by the Board of the Federal Judicial Center that the Center's history be documented while it was still possible to tap the recollections and insights of those active in its creation and early work. This article is a revision of an unpublished paper delivered at the June 1980 Law and Society Association annual meeting in Madison, Wis.: Wheeler, The Creation of the Federal Judicial Center as a Case Study of Innovation, Autonomy, and Control in Judicial Administration.

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