The Real Value in Appellate Oral Argument

moot-court_trimmedDoes appellate oral argument still matter?  In some courts with exceptionally heavy caseloads, such as the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, oral argument is vanishingly rare.  But even in courts that regularly hold oral argument, some observers claim that it has devolved into a dog-and-pony show unlikely to move judges who have already reached unspoken decisions based on often-voluminous briefing.

It may surprise some practitioners to learn that certain appellate courts have even taken to issuing “tentative” opinions prior to oral argument.  Certain branches of the California appellate courts have been among the leaders in this regard; the web page for the 4th District, 2nd Division claims that “the justices do not sense that their deliberations are any less objective than before the tentative opinion program began” and that “counsel almost unanimously praise the program.”

Proponents of the practice contend that it has several distinct advantages. 

Continue ReadingThe Real Value in Appellate Oral Argument

The “Statisticization” of Death: From Stalin to “The Box”

stalinWhile discussing with other Allied leaders the potential deaths of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers during the planned invasion of France during World War II, former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked, “A single death is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic.”  Whether or not the quote is apocryphal (some attribute it to the writer Erich Maria Remarque), it seems to me that we increasingly find ourselves in the perhaps unenviable position of revealing more than a kernel of truth to the sentiment.

Today, the “statisticization” of death has been reduced to a regulatory art form as part of analyses that agencies undertake to determine whether the cost of a regulation is justified by its benefits, including the number of lives it might save.  This procedure is championed by legal economists such as Cass Sunstein and Kip Viscusi, and the mathematics involved can be difficult to penetrate.  The density and abstraction of the calculations is probably for the better, because few of us could rationally and openly assign a numerical value to our own life or to the lives of our friends and family.  Viewing multiple lives in the statistical abstract, as Stalin may have done, perhaps seems to us less stomach-turning.  This concept is really nothing new: over two hundred years ago, Adam Smith theorized that sympathy was attenuated by distance.

I am not uncomfortable with cost-benefit analysis as a regulatory instrument, so long as it remains one tool in the regulator’s box and not a be-all, end-all directive that cannot be countermanded. 

Continue ReadingThe “Statisticization” of Death: From Stalin to “The Box”