Doctrine as a Disruptive Practice

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016         Doctrine as a Disruptive Practice Jessie Allen1 Abstract This article proposes a different way to think about legal reasoning that focuses on its psychological effects rather than its ability to identify legal outcomes. Legal doctrine, such as statutes and case law, is generally thought to contribute to legal decision making only to the extent that it determines legal outcomes, or at least narrows the range of justifiable outcomes. Yet in many cases that come to court, the available authorities are acknowledged to be indeterminate. Over the course of decades, various theories and methods have been proposed to justify judges’ continued reliance on doctrine. Most of this literature focuses on doctrine’s capacity to direct substantive outcomes and ignores other benefits that doctrinal reasoning might provide. Recently, however, some empirical studies have begun to consider the potential cognitive effects of judges’ engagement with doctrine. This article offers another model for how doctrine might influence judges’ perceptions. Drawing on performance theory and recent psychological studies of readers, I argue that judges’ disciplined engagement with formal legal doctrine might have selfdisrupting effects akin to those performers experience when they deliberately alter their physical and vocal habits. Investigating doctrine’s disruptive potential might help explain why judges continue to reason doctrinally despite doctrinal indeterminacy. The model of self-disruptive doctrine cannot explain how judges ultimately resolve, or should resolve, legal questions. But disruptive doctrinal effects would be valuable in and of themselves as a way for legal decision makers to set aside their usual subjective biases.

                                                                                                                    1

Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Thanks to these readers for comments on earlier drafts: Peter Gerhart, Haider Ala Hamoudi, Jules Lobel, Matiangai Sirleaf, Maxwell Stearns, Sheila Velez-Martinez, and Patricia Williams.

1    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Doctrine as a Disruptive Practice [T]he characteristic modes of legal reasoning are . . . odd, and odd in a special way. And this special oddness is that every one of the dominant characteristics of legal reasoning and legal argument can be seen as a route toward reaching a decision other than the best all-things-considered decision for the matter at hand. —Frederick Schauer2

Introduction   It  is  generally  assumed  that  legal  doctrine  matters  only  to  the  extent  that  it   provides  answers  to  legal  questions,  or  at  least  narrows  the  range  of  legal  results.   But  the  idea  that  preexisting  rules  and  decisions  can  objectively  limit  legal  outcomes   runs  headlong  into  the  equally  well-­‐accepted  understanding  that  legal  reasoning  is   an  interpretive  practice,  in  which  doctrinal  authorities  can  be  used  to  ground   contradictory  conclusions.    Indeed,  the  ability  to  use  available  legal  texts  to  produce   as  many  different  valid  outcomes  as  there  are  clients  willing  to  pay  has  long  been   recognized  as  the  paradigmatic  legal  skill.    As  a  character  in  George  Eliot’s   nineteenth-­‐century  novel  Middlemarch  observes,  “It’s  well  known  there’s  always   two  sides,  if  no  more;  else  who’d  go  to  law,  I  should  like  to  know?”3    Yet  judges   continue  to  issue  decisions  couched  primarily  in  doctrinal  terms,  even  in  cases   openly  acknowledged  to  require  policy  choices.      

                                                                                                                2

FREDERICK SCHAUER, THINKING LIKE A LAWYER 7 (2009).

3

GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH 689 (Zodiac Press 1950) (1872).

2    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     The  standard  accounts  frame  doctrinal  reasoning as a turn toward some external, recognized legal authority that identifies the correct result or at least points judges in the right direction. As Joseph Raz puts it, “law is source based.”4 The trouble is that exactly what sources should be considered, and how a judge should consider them, are frequently contested. Judicial decisions are frequently predictable, but not because we can say for sure that the law judges apply requires the predicted result. On reflection, authorities that seemed to easily resolve a case in one direction may appear to dictate a different outcome. There  is  disagreement  over  the  extent  and  meaning  of  doctrinal   indeterminacy.    But  virtually  everyone  acknowledges  that  at  least  some  of  the  time   in  at  least  some  legal  decisions  regarded  as  important,  formal  doctrinal  reasoning   cannot  provide  substantive  answers.5    Yet  in  most  of  these  decisions,  judges   continue  to  reason  doctrinally,  or  at  least  to  act  and  write,  as  if  formal  doctrinal   reasoning  were  a  significant  part  of  their  decision  making  process.6       I  want  to  see  if  I  can  imagine  the  work  of  doctrine  in  a  different  way.    Rather   than  a  source  of  substantive  answers,  I  will  consider  doctrinal  reasoning  as  a  formal   cultural  practice  that  might  affect  the  minds  of  its  practitioners.    With  the  help  of                                                                                                                   4

JOSEPH RAZ, THE AUTHORITY OF LAW (1979).

5

See Mark Tushnet, Critical Legal Theory (without modifiers) in the United States, 13 J. POL. PHIL. 99, 108 (2005) (asserting that “nearly every serious legal scholar in the United States” believes that “many results were underdetermined,” or “results in many interesting cases were” or “enough results were underdetermined to matter”). See also Edmond Cahn, Jurisprudence, 1952 ANNUAL SURVEY AM. L. 765, 769 (1952) (“Most writers in the Anglo-American tradition would now agree that the judicial process is, at least in part, legislative”).

6

See Jessie Allen, The Persistence of Proximate Cause, 90 DENVER U. L. REV. 77, 95 (2012) (giving examples of judicial decisions that engage in doctrinal proximate cause analysis while acknowledging that proximate cause cannot determine the outcome).

3    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     performance  theory  and  some  recent  psychological  research,  I  offer  an  account  of   how  engaging  in  formal  doctrinal  reasoning  might  produce  temporary  psychological   changes  in  legal  decision  makers  without  directing  their  decisions.      In  this  account,   legal  decision  makers  might  reach  results  that  are  not  objectively  limited  by   doctrinal  authorities,  but  those  results  might  still  be  said  to  meet  the  basic  rule-­‐of-­‐ law  criterion  that  they  were  produced  by  looking  outside  the  decision  maker’s  own   subjective  will.7    My hypothesis is that, without dictating substance, doctrinal reasoning might have some useful work to do as a practice with psychological effects that tend to shift judges away from their usual subjective outlooks. Perhaps we reason doctrinally – and should keep reasoning doctrinally – not, or not only, because doctrine points to answers, but because doctrinal analysis is a practical technique that disrupts decision makers’ ordinary subjective perspectives and thus contributes to a kind of relative impartiality.     There  is  an  urgent  reason  for  considering  what  the  practice  of  doctrinal   reasoning  contributes  to  legal  decision  making.    While  we  remain  ostensibly   committed  to  the  idea  that  legal  doctrine  plays  an  important  role  in  generating  legal   outcomes,  more  and  more  often  those  outcomes  are  reached  through  informal   procedures.    The  declining  proportion  of  trials  is  a  well-­‐documented  trend.8                                                                                                                     7

As Keith Bybee puts it, “The rule of law, in its essence is a matter of requiring people to ‘look outside their own will for criteria of judgment.’” Keith J. Bybee, The Rule of Law Is Dead! Long Live the Rule of Law!, in WHAT’S LAW GOT TO DO WITH IT? 306, 306 (Charles Gardner Geyh ed., 2011) (quoting LIEF H. CARTER & THOMAS F. BURKE, REASON IN LAW 147 (7TH ED. 2007)).

8  

See Judith Resnik, Courts: In and Out of Sight, Site, and Cite, 53 Vill. L. Rev. 771 (2008) (“Of one hundred civil cases filed, trials start in fewer than two.”); Marc Galanter, A World Without Trials?, 2006 J. Disp. Resol. 7 (2006) (“[T]here is an abundance of data that shows that trials . . . are declining precipitously.”).

4    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Increasingly,  legal  claims  are  resolved  through  managerial  judging,  settlement   negotiation,  mediation,  and  plea  bargaining  with  little  or  no  doctrinal  reasoning   involved.9  Such  informal  methods  are  sometimes  said  to  preserve  legality  because   preexisting  legal  rules  continue  to  cast  a  substantive  “shadow”  over  the  decision   making  processes  and  so  influence  their  outcome  in  rational  ways.10    But  to  the   extent  that  doctrinal  reasoning  generates  legality  through  immediate  psychological   effects  on  practitioners,  those  effects  are  lost  when  decisions  are  not  reached   through  the  actual  process  of  formal  doctrinal  reasoning.     My  exploration  of  doctrinal  reasoning’s  practical  effects  proceeds  in  three   parts.    Part  I  shows  how  mainstream  accounts  of  legal  reasoning  fail  to  explain  why   judges  continue  to  reason  doctrinally.  A variety of narratives have been mobilized, implicitly and explicitly, to rationalize judges’ continued doctrinal practice. Here I identify three different versions that I call the “integrationist,” “fidelity,” and “legal art” accounts, and explain why each fails to justify doctrinal reasoning in the face of doctrinal indeterminacy. The integrationist account views legal reasoning as a combination of doctrinal and policy-based reasoning, but fails to explain how doctrine can effectively                                                                                                                 9

Moreover, even when cases produce formally adjudicated decisions, the judges who sign these decision sometimes have had little to do with the actual process of doctrinal reasoning that leads to the reported outcome. Judges often rely on law clerks and court attorneys to produce drafts of the doctrinally reasoned opinions that judges sometimes edit with little actual engagement with the relevant legal texts. See Stephen L. Wasby, The World of Law Clerks, 98 MARQUETTE L. REV. 111, 120-21 (2014).

10

See Robert H. Mnookin & Lewis Kornhauser, Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce, 88 Yale L.J. 950 (1979) (discussing how divorcing parents negotiating the division of money and custody are influenced by what would happen if the case went to trial); Stephanos Bibas, Plea Bargaining Outside the Shadow of Trial, 117 Harv. L. Rev. 2463 (2004) (explaining that when parties plea bargain, they rely on expected trial outcomes).

5    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     limit results once evaluative policy analysis is in play. The fidelity account focuses on judges’ conscious efforts to follow legal rules, but cannot explain how those efforts matter if the rules are indeterminate. The legal art account is a promising but underdeveloped approach that compares judges’ use of doctrine to the aesthetic techniques of artists and craftsmen.

 

In Part II of the article, I discuss two experimental studies that suggest that doctrinal reasoning may have psychological effects on its practitioners. For a long time, empirical studies focused on the influence of non-doctrinal factors, and empirical scholars have repeatedly shown that judges’ subjective perspectives, from political ideology to how long it has been since they ate breakfast, are correlated with decision making patterns.11 Lately, however, a number of researchers have changed tack. They have set about examining whether and how “the law,” including doctrinal authorities, “matters” in legal decision making.12 The results of these experiments further emphasize                                                                                                                 11

Classic studies of the influence of judges’ political ideologies include Jeffrey A. Segal & Albert D. Cover, Ideological Values and the Votes of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 83 AM. POLIT. SCI. REV. 557 (1989); JEFFREY A. SEGAL & HAROLD J. SPAETH, THE SUPREME COURT AND THE ATTITUDINAL MODEL (1993); JEFFREY A. SEGAL & HAROLD J. SPAETH, THE SUPREME COURT AND THE ATTITUDINAL MODEL REVISITED (2002). Jerome Frank, one of the best known Realists, darkly asserted that judicial outcomes were so little determined by legal principle that they depended on “what the judge ate for breakfast” on the morning of the decision. JEROME FRANK, LAW AND THE MODERN MIND (1930). A study of parole board rulings suggests that Frank’s critique may be less hyperbolic and more accurate than even he realized. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, & Liora Avnaim-Pesso, Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions 108 PNAS 6889 (2011). Danziger et al. found that favorable parole rulings correlated with proximity to the judges’ two daily food breaks. Id. at 6890.

12

See, e.g., Lee Epstein & Jack Knight, Reconsidering Judicial Preferences, 16 ANN. REV. POLIT. SCI. 11 (2013); Michael D. Gilbert, Does Law Matter? Theory and Evidence from SingleSubject Adjudicaiton, 40 J. LEGAL STUD. 333 (2011).

6    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     the need for a theory of how doctrinal reasoning might affect legal decision makers’ points of view without dictating substantive results.  In  Part  III,  I  propose  another  way  to  understand  the  practice  of  doctrinal   reasoning.    My  account  focuses  on  an  aspect  of  doctrinal  practice  that  is  often  taken   for  granted:    doctrine’s  claimed  capacity  to  turn  decision  makers  away  from  their   usual  perspectives.  This is such an obvious aspect of doctrinal work, that it is generally left unexamined. After all, we may disagree about what counts as authoritative law and how to go about applying it to a given issue, but surely we can all agree that if I am a judge ruling in a legal case, I am being asked to do something other than just decide what Jessie Allen thinks is the right result. Nevertheless, as obvious as that point might seem, I propose that exploring the way doctrinal reasoning distances its practitioners from their ordinary viewpoints might help us see something new about the way doctrine works. Picking  up  on  the  legal  art  accounts  discussed  in  Part  I,  which  consider   doctrinal  reasoning  as  a  kind  aesthetic  practice,  my  analysis  compares  doctrinal   reasoners’  abandonment  of  their  usual  subjective  perspectives  to  performers’   techniques  for  playing  characters.  By  invoking  theater,  I  do  not  mean  to  denigrate   doctrinal  reasoning  as  a  kind  of  false  judicial  showmanship.  In  my  view,  there  is  a   similarity  worth  exploring  in  the  deliberate  moves  both  judges  and  actors  make   away  from  their  ordinary  ways  of  seeing  and  reacting  to  the  world.    Performance   theory  is  useful  for  my  account  because  it  considers  directly  both  the  significance  

7    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     and  the  mechanics  of  the  shift  away  from  the  ordinary  self  that  is  an  avowed  goal  of   both  performance  and  legal  decision  making.13     I.

The  Problem  of  Doctrine  

Judges’ continued reliance on formal doctrinal reasoning is a conundrum. It is widely acknowledged that available doctrinal authority cannot identify a uniquely correct legal outcome in all, or perhaps in most, of the cases that come to court.14 Nevertheless most judicial opinions continue to be produced in doctrinal terms, and we continue to act as if doctrinal analysis dictates objectively correct legal outcomes. The indeterminacy of legal doctrine is not news to lawyers and judges, or to the public at large. Nearly a hundred years ago the Legal Realists criticized doctrinal reasoning as an illusory cover for political and cultural values that drove judicial decisions.15 The Realists argued persuasively that much of what passed for doctrinal analysis was circular reasoning, or dependent on metaphors and concepts that were open to interpretation and thus incapable of determining outcomes. Since the Realist critique it is rare for any lawyer or legal scholar to deny that subjective factors play some part in                                                                                                                 13

See, e.g., RICHARD SCHECHNER, BETWEEN THEATER & ANTHROPOLOGY 35-41 (1986); Berthold Brecht, Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting, in BRECHT ON THEATRE 91-99 (ed. & tr. John Willett 1964).

14

Tushnet, supra note 10; Joseph William Singer, Legal Realism Now, 76 CAL. L. REV. 465 (1988) (asserting that all mainstream jurisprudential theories accept some degree of doctrinal indeterminacy). See also Jessie Allen, The Persistence of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives on Skepticism, 90 DENVER L. REV. 77 (2012).

15

See, e.g., Felix Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35 COLUM. L. REV. 809 (1935); Leon Green, The Duty Problem in Negligence 28 COLUM. L. REV. 1014, (1928) and JEROME FRANK, LAW AND THE MODERN MIND 12 (2D ED. 1931) [1930].

8    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     legal outcomes. For that matter, Brian Tamanaha has pointed out that skeptical views of doctrinal determinacy can be found long before the Realists critique, in writings by lawyers and judges from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.16 Nor are legal professionals the only ones to recognize that doctrine does not decide all cases. The American public apparently shares the understanding that judges’ decisions are influenced by politics, at least at the highest levels.17 If we have openly acknowledged that doctrine cannot produce substantive legal answers in all the cases that employ doctrinal reasoning, but that tension has not disrupted our legal system, why worry? The problem is that the legitimacy of legal enforcement rests at least partly on a claim that legal decisions are based on something other than the decision makers’ own subjective judgment. The basic concept of a “rule of law, not a rule of men” is, as Ronald Dworkin put it, that judicial decisions “deploying the state’s monopoly of coercive power should be taken only as required by true propositions of law.”18 In more rule-based terms, Andrew Taslitz explained, “judges  are   not  legislators;  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  they  should  not  rely  on  their  personal  set  of  policy  goals   rather  than  the  dictates  of  law.”19  If preexisting legal authorities do not determine, or at                                                                                                                 16

BRIAN Z. TAMANAHA, BEYOND THE FORMALIST-REALIST DIVIDE: THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN JUDGING (2010) 27-43.

17

James L. Gibson & Gregory A. Caldeira, Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court? 45 LAW & SOC. REV. 195, 206-08 (2011) (reporting finding that 65% of those surveyed agreed that “Supreme Court judges have a great deal of leeway in their decisions, even when they claim to be ‘interpreting’ the Constitution,” and 57% agree that “judges are really basing their decisions on their own personal beliefs”).

18

RONALD DWORKIN, JUSTICE IN ROBES 18 (2006).

19

Taslitz supra note at

9    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     least contribute significantly to judges’ decisions, then it is hard to see why those decisions justify coercive enforcement. This is a problem of basic legality. In addition, there are problems of integrity and transparency. If judges’ decisions are not really driven by doctrinal analysis, but judges articulate their decisions in doctrinal terms, those doctrinal explanations raise concerns about deception, including self-deception. As a policy matter, it is important to understand all the ways doctrine contributes to adjudication in order to decide whether and how to preserve doctrinal reasoning as part of legal process. This is not a purely academic question. Perhaps in part because after the Realist critique it was unclear how doctrine contributes to the legitimacy of adjudicated outcomes, formal doctrine’s role in legal decision making seems to be diminishing. The well documented decline of both civil and criminal trials and the rise of alternative dispute resolution and plea bargaining means that more and more legal outcomes are produced without much if any formal doctrinal reasoning.20 As Judith Resnik has pointed out repeatedly, the decline of formal public adjudication is not just a matter of individual parties opting for more private and efficient conflict resolution. The trend has serious implications for the meaning of rights in democratic society.21 In order to understand fully what is lost when informal processes replace adjudication, we need to understand whether and how the central practice of doctrinal reasoning contributes to legal process and to the legitimacy of adjudicated results.

                                                                                                                20

See Marc Galanter, The Vanishing Trial.

21

See, e.g., Judith Resnik, Courts in and out of Cite, Site and Sight; Bring Back Bentham, Whither Adjudication.

10    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     In mainstream discussions of legal decision making today, one can observe several different approaches to managing the clash between our ideal of legal outcomes generated by objective doctrine and our understanding that doctrine is actually indeterminate. The most common approach, which I call “integrationist,” attempts to rescue doctrinal efficacy by suggesting that doctrinal reasoning works in conjunction with reasoned policy evaluation to somehow narrow or direct the results of ordinary evaluative decision making. A second “fidelity approach” emphasizes the subjective attitudes and good faith of judicial decision makers. This perspective shifts the focus from the capacity of doctrine to objectively shape legal outcomes to the willingness of judges to consciously subjugate their own will to the dictates of legal forms. Finally, a third, less common, model that I call the “legal art” approach analogizes doctrinal reasoning to techniques of artists or craftsmen, suggesting that the role of doctrine may be primarily to shape the decision maker, rather than the decision. The basic problem with all three of these approaches, as they have so far been articulated, is that they either remain explicitly wedded to the idea that doctrinal reasoning must somehow work to direct substantive legal results, or simply fail to offer any alternative explanation for how working with doctrine legitimates legal decision making. A.

Explaining Doctrine’s Continued Role in Legal Reasoning – the Integrationist Approach

The  most  common  way  of  defusing  the  contradiction  between  doctrinal   indeterminacy  and  continued  doctrinal  practice  treats  legal  reasoning  as  a   combination  of  doctrinal  reasoning  with  evaluative  policy  choices.    This  model   acknowledges  that  doctrine  alone  cannot  identify  correct  legal  outcomes,  but  insists   11    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     that  doctrinal  reasoning  can  and  should  still  be  a  significant  causal  factor  in  the   decisions  judges  reach.    The  idea  is  that  doctrinal  reasoning  is  partly  responsible  for   legal  outcomes,  and  that  other  forms  of  reasoning  –  often  evaluative  policy  choices  –   round  off  the  legal  decision  making  process.    I  call  this  approach  “integrationist,”   because  as  I  understand  it,  the  claim  is  that  doctrinal  analysis  and  policy  evaluation   merge  in  an  integral  process  that  preserves  doctrine’s  contribution  across  a  body  of   judicial  decisions,  if  not  within  every  single  legal  analysis.22    Exactly  how  doctrine   and  other  kinds  of  reasoning  combine,  however,  is  rarely  fleshed  out,  and  when  the   combination  is  described,  accounts  vary  widely  and  sometimes  defy  logic.       The  view  that  legal  reasoning  combines,  and  should  combine,  both  doctrinal   reasoning  and  subjective  policy  evaluation  seems  to  be  the  default  position  of  the   legal  academy  these  days.23    Students  learn  doctrinal  techniques  that  match  the   rationales  judges  give  in  their  decisions,  and  at  the  same  time  law  professors  stress     that  various  policy  considerations  and  value  judgments  are  at  work  that  help   explain  and  justify  courts’  decisions.24    Indeed the idea that formal doctrinal reasoning                                                                                                                 22

Other meaning of integrationist: a theory of communication that rejects rule-based models of language and emphasizes the importance of context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrationism

23 See BRIAN TAMANAHA, LAW AS A MEANS TO AN END 132 (2006) (Noting that most legal academics do not identify as either realists or formalists but that most view law instrumentally, i.e., as means to achieving policy ends, as the realists advocated); RICHARD POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK 4, 9, 80, 376 (e.g., “judges perforce have occasional – indeed rather frequent – recourse to . . . their own political opinions or policy judgments.” Id. at 9) 24

See JOSEPH WILLIAM SINGER, BETHANY R. BERGER, NESTOR M. DAVIDSON, EDUARDO MOISES PENALVER, PROPERTY LAW: RULES, POLICIES, AND PRACTICES 393 (2014) (Asserting that “the fact that it is almost always possible to generate plausible, conventional legal arguments on both sides of a case in which both parties have intuitively attractive claims” means that judges must decide “the relative strength of competing claims in particular social contexts” using policy arguments.”); see also, FREDERICK SCHAUER, THINKING LIKE A LAWYER 144-45 (Noting that,

12  

 

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     and policy analysis fit together in legal decision often seems to be regarded as too commonplace to require explanation. For instance, a recent speaker at my law school described courts’ efforts to articulate a doctrinal test to distinguish patentable creations from unpatentable products of nature.25 After some criticism of doctrinal ambiguity and confusion, he suggested that despite judges’ sincere attempts to develop and apply doctrine, the outcomes in these patent cases were actually driven less by doctrinal categories than by two policy goals – avoiding overbroad monopolies that would chill future research and preventing infringement on existing patent rights. But then, in the next breath, he was back to a discussion of doctrine; narrating the courts’ doctrinal struggles as if the outcomes of these cases depended on judges’ doctrinal analysis rather than the policy considerations he had just identified. When I asked him about the relationship of doctrine and policy in the analysis he was describing, he replied simply that judges use a combination of doctrinal precedent and policy analysis. He offered no explanation of what work doctrine could be doing once a judge was engaged in evaluating how to best shape the outcome to serve policy goals. Nor is it easy to produce such an explanation. Any  account  of  how  doctrine  combines  with  policy  analysis  faces  the   fundamental  problem  that  doctrinal  reasoning  is  generally  conceived  as  an  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          although “]b]eliefs in the total determinacy of legal doctrine may have withered,” the typical torts casebook still relies “heavily on the traditional legal categories of tort doctrine.”) 25

See Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., U.S. (2013); Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs, Inc., 566 U.S. (2012); Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980). See also D’Arcy v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. High Ct. Australia (2015).

13    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     alternative  to  policy  evaluation.26    The  point  of  applying  preexisting  legal  doctrine  is   to  adopt  a  decision  making  method  through  which  judges  avoid  applying  their  own   views  about  good  social  policy.27    It  is  therefore  hard  to  see  how  a  judge  can   combine  her  own  policy  preferences  with  doctrinal  analysis  when  doctrine  is   supposed  to  be  the  mechanism  through  which  judges  defer  to  policy  goals   established  externally28       Integrationist  accounts  sometimes  assert  that  only  some  cases  require  policy   analysis  while  many  legal  questions  can  be  answered  by  doctrine  alone.    There  is   little  consensus,  however,  on  how  to  tell  which  cases  require  policy  evaluation.     Sometimes  the  line  between  doctrinally  resolvable  cases  and  those  that  require   policy  is  said  to  be  a  question  of  complexity.    In  other  accounts,  doctrine  is  sufficient   in  run  of  the  mine  disputes,  but  incapable  of  deciding  cases  involving  new  situations   or  political  or  cultural  controversies.  As  Andrew  Taslitz  explained,  “any  lawyer                                                                                                                   26

Frederick Schauer, Precedent.

27 See Sir William Blackstone, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND, vol. I, introduction sec. III (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1893) (“For it is an established rule to abide by former precedents, where the same points come again in litigation: as well to keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion; as also because the law in that case being solemnly declared and determined, what before was uncertain, and perhaps indifferent, is now become a permanent rule, which it is not in the breast of any subsequent judge to alter or vary from according to his private sentiments: he being sworn to determine, not according to his own private judgement, but according to the known laws and customs of the land; not delegated to pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one”); Duncan Kennedy, Legal Formality, 2 J. LEG. STUD. 351, 358 (1973) (Formal doctrinal analysis is an attempt to achieve substantively rational results by using rules “rather than directly through substantively rational decision processes.”) 28

see James Wilson, THE WORKS OF JAMES WILSON 502 (McCloskey ed. 1967) (“every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it”); James Kent, COMMENTARIES ON AMERICAN LAW 472-73 (Little, Brown and Co. 1896) (“ the common law, under the correction of the Constitution and statute law of the United States, would seem to be a necessary and a safe guide, in all cases, civil and criminal, arising under the exercise of that jurisdiction, and not specially provided for by statute. Without such a guide, the courts would be left to a dangerous discretion, and to roam at large in the trackless field of their own imaginations”).

14    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     worth  his  or  her  salt  knows,  and  any  citizen  should  know,  that  law’s  meaning  or  its   application  to  new  or  divisive  circumstances  is  frequently  ambiguous.”29  Sometimes   the  line  between  doctrinally  determinate  and  indeterminate  cases  is  said  to  mirror   institutional  levels  of  judicial  review.    Various  commentators  assert,  for  instance,   that  doctrine  can  resolve  most  cases  that  end  at  the  trial  court  level,  or  that  are   resolved  pre-­‐trial,  or  that  never  make  it  to  court.30  Frederick  Schauer  observes  that   controversies  that  come  to  court  tend  to  be  the  “cases  in  which  both  sides  think  that   they  have  a  colorable  enough  legal  argument  that  is  worth  spending  time  and  to  go   to  court.”31  He  points  out  that  doctrine  would  still  be  playing  an  important  social   role  if  it  resolves  everyday  questions  (do  I  really  have  to  stop  at  that  red  light?)  and   only  leaves  open  the  conflicts  that  make  it  to  formal  adjudication.  Of  course  the   cases  that  come  to  court  are  the  ones  whose  outcomes  judges  justify  with  formal   doctrinal  explanation,  so  even  if  doctrine  is  somehow  resolving  out  of  court   disputes,  we  still  need  an  explanation  of  its  work  in  adjudicated  decisions.   In  a  different  version  of  the  integrationist  narrative,  doctrine  is  said  to  work   to  a  limited  extent  in  all  or  virtually  all  cases.    In  this  view,  even  in  complex,                                                                                                                   29

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/05/sonia-sotomayor-at-last-a-bronxcandidate.html#more-16545 30

See Frederick Schauer, Legal Realism Untamed, describing the “widespread view” shared by HLA Hart and Karl Llewellyn, “that law has a relatively straightforward operation in most non-litigated instances of legal application, but that in litigated cases, and especially in appellate cases, legal determinacy often disappears,” but noting that “Hart and Llewellyn plainly disagreed about the size of this domain of indeterminacy, especially in comparison with the size of the domain of determinacy. Id. at 6 citing H.LA. Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals, 71 HARV. L. REV. 593, 607-08 (1958). 31

FREDERICK SCHAUER, THINKING LIKE A LAWYER 137 (2009).

15    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     controversial  cases  doctrine  narrows  the  field  of  available  results  or  focuses   decision  makers  on  certain  objectively  relevant  aspects  of  conflicts,  while  still   leaving  some  room  for  policy  choices.32    So,  for  instance,  Judge  Alex  Kozinski  writes,   “Under  our  law  judges  do  in  fact  have  considerable  discretion  in  certain  of  their   decisions:  making  findings  of  fact,  interpreting  language  in  the  Constitution,   statutes,  and  regulations  .  .  .  .  The  larger  reality,  however,  is  that  judges  exercise   their  powers  subject  to  very  significant  constraints.”33  According  to  Tazlitz,  “That   doesn’t  mean  that  the  law  can  mean  anything  a  judge  wants  it  to  mean,  but  it  does   mean  that  the  law  can  bear  a  range  of  reasonable  meanings.”34  Such  assertions  of   widespread  but  somehow  limited  doctrinal  indeterminacy  are  quite  common,  but   explanations  of  exactly  when  and  how  doctrinal  analysis  combines  with  other  forms   of  reasoning  and  how  doctrine  provides  the  asserted  limits  are  less  common.35     Moreover,  integrationist  accounts  do  not  match  the  thoroughly  doctrinal  analysis   described  in  most  courts’  reported  decisions.  As  Richard  Posner  observes,  “most                                                                                                                   32

See, e.g., William P. Marshall, Judicial Takings, Judicial Speech, and Doctrinal Acceptance of the Model of the Judge as Political Actor, 6 DUKE J. CON. L. & PUB. POL. 1,2 (2011) (“Most lawyers like to believe that legal rules, legal doctrine and legal reasoning matter even in close cases.”)

33

Alex Kozinski, What I Ate for Breakfast, 26 LOYOLA L.A. L. REV. 993 (1993).

34

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/05/sonia-sotomayor-at-last-a-bronxcandidate.html#more-16545

35

Judicial decisions remain relentlessly doctrinal in their expression, even when they express doubts about the determinacy of the doctrines they ostensibly apply. Although most judicial decisions continue to be framed in doctrinal terms, one often finds judges asserting that doctrine is indeterminate, sometimes in the same opinions in which the doctrines are being applied. See e.g., Derdiarian v. Felix Contracting Corp., 414 N.E. 2d 666 (N.Y. 1980) (acknowledging that the doctrine of proximate cause is “elusive” but nevertheless proceeding through a full fledged doctrinal analysis).

16    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     judges  are  hybrids,”  that  is,  they  combine  doctrinal  reasoning  and  policy  analysis,   formalism  and  realism.  36    Nevertheless,  “you  wouldn’t  gather  this  from  judicial   opinions  because  most  opinions,  even  in  cases  that  can  be  adequately  explained  only   in  realist  terms,  are  formalist  in  style.”  37     The  extent  of  indeterminacy  posited  sometimes  seems  at  odds  with  the   analyst’s  overarching  legal  theory.    Thus,  Posner,  an  avowed  legal  pragmatist  who   maintains  that  judges  should  make  policy  outcomes  the  linchpin  of  their  decision   making,  nevertheless  believes  that  “[l]egalism,”  i.e.,  doctrinal  reasoning,  “drives   most  judicial  decisions,  though  generally  they  are  the  less  important  ones  for  the   development  of  legal  doctrine  or  the  impact  on  society.”38    Meanwhile,  Schauer,   probably  the  foremost  proponent  today  of  legal  reasoning  as  a  rule  bound  system,   seems  comfortable  with  the  view  that  few,  if  any,  cases  that  judges  decide  are   doctrinally  determined.39     Given  Posner’s  endorsement  of  consequential  policy  analysis  as  a  legitimate   judicial  approach,  it  is  striking  that  he  maintains  that  most  adjudicated  cases  are                                                                                                                   36

RICHARD A. POSNER, REFLECTIONS ON JUDGING 267 (2013).

37

Id. As Frederick Schauer says, “it is the rare judge who does not think it important to justify on traditional legal grounds a decision reached for other reasons.” Schauer, Thinking Like at 144

38

RICHARD A. POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK 8 (2008). 39

According to Schauer, “Law abounds with such straightforward applications,” but “the set of cases that winds up in court, and even more the smaller set that winds up in an appellate court, consists pretty much only of those cases in which both sides think that they have a colorable enough legal argument that it is worth spending time and money to go to court.” FREDERICK SCHAUER, THINKING LIKE A LAWYER 137 (2009). Compare Posner’s view that “most appeals to federal courts of appeals can be decided satisfactorily by straightforward application of known an definite law to the facts of the case.” Posner, supra at 107.

17    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     decided  doctrinally,  although  most  important  cases  are  not.40  This  confidence  in   routine  doctrinal  determinacy  is  important.    Although  it  does  not  explain  doctrinal   reasoning’s  role  in  cases  that  doctrine  cannot  decide,  it  has  a  normalizing  effect  on   otherwise  unexplained  uses  of  doctrine.    It  tends  to  portray  doctrine  as  the  central,   usual  mode  of  legal  reasoning.    That  perceived  centrality  makes  it  seem  less  curious   that  judges  continue  to  reason  doctrinally  and  to  write  decisions  in  doctrinal  terms   in  cases  where  doctrine  fails  to  determine  outcomes.    Nevertheless,  Posner   acknowledges  that  some  significant  number  of  “important”  judicial  decisions   require  more  than  doctrine,  and  he  gives  considerable  attention  to  the  question  how   judges  go  about  deciding  cases  using  both  doctrine  and  policy,  though  his   descriptions  of  that  process  are  not  always  consistent.41   Sometimes  Posner  suggests  that  policy  should  be  considered  only  when   doctrine  is  altogether  out  of  the  decision  making  process.    For  instance,  he  asserts   that  doctrinal  indeterminacy  “create[s]  an  open  area  in  which  judges  have   decisional  discretion  –  a  blank  slate  on  which  to  inscribe  their  decisions.”42     Of  course  if  policy  comes  in  only  after  doctrinal  reasoning  is  abandoned  as   indeterminate,  there  is  no  problem  with  the  incommensurability  of  these  two                                                                                                                   40

RICHARD A. POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK (2008) (“Legalism,” i.e., traditional legal materials and methods, including doctrinal reasoning, “drives most judicial decisions, though generally they are the less important ones for the development of legal doctrine or the impact on society.” Id. at 8.) 41

Id. at 9. Moreover, Posner suggests that often a judge “is unconscious of a sharp break between his legalistic and his legislative activity on the bench,” and this “produced leakage between his consideration of routine and of nonroutine cases.” Id. at 85. 42

Id. at 9.

18    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     decision-­‐making  methods.    The  substitution  of  policy  for  doctrine,  however,  raises   the  gaping  original  question  about  what  role  doctrine  continues  to  play  and  if  the   answer  is  “none,”  what  makes  the  resulting  non-­‐doctrinal  decision  authoritatively   legal  and  a  legitimate  basis  for  government  enforcement.       Perhaps  for  that  reason,  Posner  sometimes  seems  to  be  suggesting  that   doctrine  and  policy  do  combine  in  individual  legal  cases.  He  writes  of  policy  being   used  to  “close  the  deal”  after  doctrine  “leads  nowhere.”43    The  picture  of  policy   taking  over  to  “close  the  deal”  seems  to  suggest  that  policy  can  come  in  at  the  end  of   an  analysis  to  finish  a  job  begun  –  and  still  constrained,  limited  or  at  least  influenced   -­‐-­‐  by  doctrine.44    But  it  is  not  as  though  an  indeterminate  doctrinal  result  is   somehow  unfinished  and  can  then  be  rounded  out  or  revised  slightly  with  policy   considerations  –  at  least  not  in  winner  take  all  adjudicative  situations  in  which  only   one  party  can  prevail.  Assuming  that  doctrine  does  not  leave  the  result  completely   open,  a  judge  using  doctrinal  reasoning  will  arrive  at  an  under-­‐determined  decision   of  where  liability  lies;  defendant  or  plaintiff  wins.    If  the  judge  goes  on  to  consider   policy,  only  one  of  two  things  can  happen  –  either  the  policy  considerations  confirm   the  original  doctrinal  outcome,  or  they  change  it.  Of  course  the  rationale  can  be   revised  and  supplemented,  but  the  ruling  itself  –  judgment  for  plaintiff  or  defendant   -­‐-­‐  either  stands  or  falls.    Adjudication  is  relentlessly  binary:  She  loves  me,  she  loves   me  not  .  .  .  .  Once  subjective  policy  considerations  come  back  in  after  an  initial,  or                                                                                                                   43

Id. at 28.

44

See, for example,

19    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     partial,  doctrinal  analysis,  it  seems  the  decision  maker  is  free  to  either  confirm  or   reverse  the  provisional  doctrinal  result.    If  judges  start  with  doctrine  and  later   resort  to  policy  after  finding  doctrine  indeterminate,  it  is  hard  to  see  what   substantive  work  the  doctrine  can  still  be  doing.    According  to  Posner,  while  some   judges  consider  policy  only  after  they  have  tried  and  failed  to  decide  the  case  with   doctrine,  most  “blend  the  two  inquiries,  the  legalist  and  the  legislative,  rather  than   addressing  them  in  sequence.”45  If  that  is  the  case,  then  we  still  need  a  theory  of  how   that  combination  is  possible.      

Schauer’s  integrationist  account  avoids  the  problematic  first-­‐doctrine-­‐then-­‐

policy  model  by  accepting  the  Realist  view  that  judges  initially  choose  legal   outcomes  based  on  social  policy  preferences  and  then  turn  to  doctrine  to  justify   those  choices.46  Schauer  rightly  points  out  that  doctrine  could  still  provide   significant  substantive  guidance,  if  judges  subjected  their  initial  policy  conclusions   to  doctrinal  analysis  and  that  doctrinal  analysis  could  confirm  or  reject  the  legal   correctness  of  the  judge’s  initial  policy-­‐driven  result.47    But  of  course  this   constraining  role  for  doctrine  requires  doctrine  to  actually  prescribe  one  policy-­‐ driven  outcome  over  another.    The  problem  with  Schauer’s  explanation,  then,  is  that   everything  still  depends  on  doctrine’s  ability  to  direct  or  constrain  legal  outcomes.                                                                                                                     45

Id. at 84

46

You might think that this Realist approach would conflict with Schauer’s over arching rule-based account of legal reasoning, but he apparently regards it as entirely uncontroversial. Indeed, he characterizes this integrationist approach as “an account of judging with which few sitting judges . . . would disagree.” Schauer supra note at 131. 47

Id. at 128.

20    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Once  again  this  doctrinal  capacity  to  limit  results  is  precisely  what  observers,   including  Schauer,  concede  is  absent  from  many  if  not  most  adjudicated  cases.       The  bottom  line  is  that  to  argue  that  doctrine  can  combine  with  policy  to   produce  a  recognizably  legal  outcome,  you  must  believe  that  doctrinal  reasoning   does  something  other  than  simply  allow  the  decision  maker  to  choose  results   according  to  her  own  best  all-­‐things-­‐considered  analysis.    Integrationist  accounts   have  failed  to  articulate  how  doctrine  might  shape  legal  results  other  than  by   directing  substantive  results,  and  substantive  doctrinal  determinacy  is  precisely   what  most  observers  acknowledge  is  missing  in  at  least  a  significant  number  of   cases  that  undergo  judicial  decision  making  and  are  resolved  in  doctrinal  terms.48   B.  Non-­‐Substantive  Accounts  of  the  Continued  Role  for  Doctrinal  Reasoning   Two  other  approaches  to  justifying  doctrinal  reasoning  appear  in  legal   literature,  although  much  less  frequently  than  integrationist  accounts.    Both  offer   ways  to  ground  doctrinal  reasoning  that  are  not  rooted  in  doctrine’s  capacity  to   identify  objectively  correct  legal  outcomes.    So  these  explanations,  which  I  call  the   “fidelity”  and  “legal  art”  accounts,  avoid  a  confrontation  with  doctrinal   indeterminacy.    The  trouble  is  that,  having  abandoned  substantive  determinacy  as   the  doctrinal  raison  d’etre,  they  fail  to  explain  how  indeterminate  doctrinal   reasoning  actually  could  contribute  to  the  legitimacy  of  adjudicated  outcomes.   1. The  Judicial  Fidelity  Approach                                                                                                                     48

“Nowadays it would be hard to find very many dissenters from the view that when judges change the law, they base their decisions on a mix of policy and principle that can hardly be thought of as a deductive or logical exercise.” Id. at 125.

21    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Some accounts of judicial decision making focus on judges’ faithful efforts to reason doctrinally, rather than doctrine’s capacity to identify or narrow down substantively correct legal outcomes. This fidelity approach implicitly equates the legitimacy of doctrinal results with the sincerity with which legal decision makers attempt to apply doctrine. The core concern is a judge’s conscious willingness to stick to an appropriate judicial role. Instead of asking how and when preexisting legal rules direct legal outcomes, the question becomes one of judges’ good faith efforts to apply the rules. The fidelity approach focuses on the difference between strategic, willful judging that pursues personal policy goals and sincere attempts by judges to find the correct legal outcome. Are judges faithfully attempting to follow the law and avoiding willfully subjective judging? If so, then under a fidelity approach, there is no conflict with the rule of law. The trouble is that it is unclear how a judge’s sincere application of indeterminate doctrine can produce legality. Brian Tamanaha is a leading proponent of the fidelity approach. For Tamanaha, “being consciously rule-bound is the essence of a system of the rule of law.” He acknowledges that “judges’ background views subconsciously influence their interpretation of the law.” Nevertheless, according to Tamanaha, judges who engage in doctrinal reasoning are not “deluded, naieve, or lying when they claim that their decisions are determined by the law.” He reasons that, because “[j]udging is a human practice,” it is necessarily susceptible to human fallibility, including the inevitable part that our personal subjective views play in our understanding of problems we face. Given that judges are human, Tamanaha contends that “[t]o the extent that a judge is consciously

22    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     rule-bound when engaged in judging, the judge is correct in claiming to be rule-bound in the only sense that this phrase can be humanly achieved.”49 The core value in this fidelity approach to legal reasoning is conscious commitment: “Judging is rule bound only if judges are committed to abide by the rules.”50 Of course this cannot ensure mechanical determinacy, when doctrine is indeterminate, as Tamanaha acknowledges. Nevertheless, from the fidelity perspective, conscious commitment can carve out a recognizable domain for law: “As long as individual justices are genuinely oriented in their decision making to produce the correct legal answer, as long as their decisions must be justified in terms of conventionally acceptable legal reasoning and authority, this is legal decision making with political influences more so than political decision making with legal influences.”51 The problem with the fidelity approach is that so long as the role of doctrine is limited to providing substantive answers, following indeterminate doctrine cannot produce legitimate results. While avoiding claims of substantive determinacy, proponents of the fidelity approach offer no alternative reason to think that doctrine can contribute to the legitimacy of judicial decisions. There is a gap, then, between a good faith judicial choice to follow doctrine and the promise that following doctrine could produce limited, and therefore legitimate, results. As Desmond Manderson observes, “the

                                                                                                                49

BRIAN TAMANAHA, LAW AS A MEANS TO AN END 242 (2006).

50

BRIAN TAMANAHA, BEYOND THE FORMALIST-REALIST DIVIDE: THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN JUDGING 199 (2010) 51

Id. at 198.

23    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     inability of rules to entirely constrain the decision of the judges is not a choice.”52 If legality means being substantively constrained by preexisting rules, but preexisting legal rules are incapable of real substantive constraint, then no amount of good-faith judicial effort will do the trick. Without a theory of how indeterminate doctrine could help a legal decision maker look outside herself for her decision, the fidelity approach fails to explain how sincere efforts to reason doctrinally can produce legality. 2. Practicing Legal Art A  second  alternative  to  the  integrationist  model  treats  doctrinal  analysis  as  a   technique  that  defines  judicial  practice,  comparable  to  certain  aesthetic  or  technical   practices.    In  this  view,  a  judge  needs  to  know  how  to  do  doctrinal  analysis  and  do  it   well  because  following  doctrinal  rules  is  categorically  part  of  how  we  understand   the  cultural  practice  of  legal  reasoning.    The  difficulty,  of  course,  is  explaining  why  a   technique  is  necessarily  a  defining  aspect  of  a  given  cultural  practice,  when  it  does   not  contribute  directly  to  many  of  the  products  of  that  practice,  whether  artistic  or   legal.53       The  background  for  this  approach  is  a  view  of  judging  as  a  craft  subject  to   critical  scrutiny  by  fellow  artisans  with  a  shared  history,  culture  and  values.    As  Felix   Cohen  put  it,  “judges  are  craftsmen,  with  aesthetic  ideals,  concerned  with  the   aesthetic  judgments  that  the  bar  and  the  law  schools  will  pass  upon  their  awkward                                                                                                                   52

Manderson supra at 481.

53

POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK at 12.

24    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     or  skillful,  harmonious  or  unharmonious,  anomalous  or  satisfying  actions  and   theories.”54  Crucially,  in  the  legal  art  approach,  the  value  of  a  judicial  decision  lies   not  entirely  in  its  substantive  result  but  also  in  the  way  in  which  that  result  was   reached  and  is  presented.    According  to  (Judge)  Frank  Coffin,  “While  we  take  pride   in  whatever  contribution  we  may  be  favored  to  make”  to  substantive  law,  “we  take   equal  pride  in  the  way  in  which  the  contribution  is  crafted.”55     The  problem  with  the  Legal  Art  approach  is  that  it  offers  no  persuasive   reason  why  a  judge’s  practice  of  doctrinal  craft  should  matter  in  judicial  decisions  in   which  that  craft  is  not  responsible  for  identifying  the  correct,  or  more  correct,  legal   outcome.    Legal  Art  accounts  either  fail  to  explain  why  practicing  indeterminate   doctrinal  reasoning  contributes  to  legitimacy,  or  harken  back  eventually  to   substantive  determinacy  as  the  underlying  rationale  for  doctrinal  craft.   In  1960,  Karl  Llewellyn  argued  that  good  appellate  decision  making  was  a   matter  of  acquired  legal  cultural  taste  or  knowledge,  a  “situation  sense”  with  which   experienced  judges  gauged  the  legal  relevance  of  different  aspects  of  the  real  life   conflicts  that  they  were  adjudicating  and  a  sense  of  “fitness  and  flavor”  about  how  to   apply  “formally  available”  doctrinal  authorities  and  techniques  to  those  situations.56     These  are  distinctly  acquired  abilities.    For  Llewellyn  the  consistency  of  judges’   decision  making  comes  not  from  their  application  of  “common  knowledge”  but                                                                                                                   54

Felix Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense, 35 COL. L. REV. 809, 845 (1935).

55

FRANK M. COFFIN, THE WAYS OF A JUDGE 196 (1980).

56

Id. at 23 and 222-223.

25    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     rather  from  their  deployment  of  “that  most  uncommon  knowledge  which  I  call  horse   sense,  the  balanced  shrewdness  of  the  expert  in  art.”57  At  a  more  detailed   metaphorical  level,  Llewellyn  compares  judges’  expert  decision  making  technique  to   an  artist’s  feel  for  the  medium  in  which  he  works.    Extends  the  analogy  between   judges’  work  with  doctrine  and  artists’  work  with  materials,  he  contrasts  the  skill  of   the  Russian  sculptor  Konekov,  “whose  chisel  woke  in  wood  the  beauty  asleep  in  it,”   with  his  benighted  contemporary  Mestrovic,  “who  wielded  his  will  upon  a  block  of   wood  as  if  it  had  been  grainless  granite.”58    Most  good  judicial  craftsmen,  Llewellyn   says,  like  good  sculptors,  “desire  to  move  in  accordance  with  the  material  as  well  as   within  it,  to  carve  with  the  grain  like  Konekov,  to  reveal  the  latent  rather  than  to   impose  new  form.”59  Certainly  the  analogy  gets  across  the  traditional  idea  that   judges  are  normatively  bound  to  work  with,  not  against,  the  relevant  precedents.     But  comparing  doctrinal  reasoning  to  sculptors’  approaches  to  wood  carving  does   little  to  explain  why  working  with  indeterminate  precedential  authorities  could   confer  legitimacy  on  judicial  results.   Defending  the  institutional  legitimacy  of  appellate  courts,  Llewellyn  points  to   the  “reckonability,”  or,  predictability,  of  judicial  decisions,  60  and  he  includes  “Legal   Doctrine”  and  “Known  Doctrinal  Techniques”  among  the  “steadying  factors”  that                                                                                                                   57

Id. at 121.

58

Id. at 222.

59

Llewellyn does allow for some exceptions – great (or at least famous) judges who worked against the grain – notably Mansfield and Coke. 60

Id. at 19.

26    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     contribute  to  making  legal  outcomes  predictable.61    Sometimes  he  seems  to  suggest   that  predictability  in  and  of  itself  could  ground  the  legitimacy  of  judicial  outcomes,   but  that  cannot  be  right.    If  judges’  decisions  are  predictable  because  they  tend  to   choose  the  outcomes  that  advance  the  prestige  of  the  judiciary  or  because  they   reflect  some  shared  political  ideology  or  cultural  prejudice,  that  hardly  makes  those   predictable  decisions  legitimate.    If,  on  the  other  hand,  judicial  decisions  were   predictable  because  they  were  determined  or  limited  by  the  application  of   preexisting  legal  doctrine,  that  would  convey  legitimacy  in  the  classic  doctrinal   sense.       Perhaps,  then,  as  others  have  suggested,  Llewellyn  actually  intended  to   endorse  a  version  of  the  integrationist  view  that  doctrine  by  itself  decides  some   significant  percentage  of  legal  cases  and/or  contributes  substantively  to  all  the  cases   in  which  it  is  used.62  But  of  course  here  we  are  back  to  the  basic  problem  that  there   is  no  reason  to  believe  that  doctrine  is  in  fact  determinative  in  many  cases  whose   reported  decisions  are  doctrinally  explained.    Llewellyn  himself  acknowledges  that   “the  authorities  taken  alone”  will  leave  the  outcome  open  “in  any  case  at  all  decently   handled  below  and  also  worth  appealing.”63    Nevertheless,  Llewellyn  suggests,   tantalizingly,  that  somehow  the  “known  and  felt  techniques  for  use  of  the  

                                                                                                                61

KARL N. LLEWELLYN, THE COMMON LAW TRADITION: DECIDING APPEALS 16-18 (1960).

62

See Brian Leiter, Realism . . . .; Schauer.

63

Id. at 21

27    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     authoritative  materials,”  can  produce  significant  limits  on  the  results,  if  not  absolute   determinacy.64    But  how  those  limits  can  be  established  remains  mysterious.   More  recently,  Richard  Posner,  has  used  a  comparison  with  artistic  practice   to  propose  that  doctrinal  reasoning  could  somehow  makes  judges  better  at   producing  legal  decisions  even  in  cases  not  substantively  guided  by  doctrine.   Specifically,  Posner  proposed  that  doctrinal  reasoning  may  be  to  judging  as  life   drawing  is  to  abstract  art.    “Just  as  some  people  think  an  artist  must  prove  he  is  a   competent  draftsman  before  he  can  be  taken  seriously  as  an  abstract  artist,”  he   observes,  “a  judge  must  prove  –  anew  in  every  case  –  that  he  is  a  competent  legal   reasoner  before  he  can  be  taken  seriously  as  a  pragmatic  judge.”65       The  problem  with  comparing  doctrinal  reasoning  to  drafting  is  that  drafting’s   place  in  visual  art  is  every  bit  as  contested  as  doctrine’s  place  in  legal  decision   making.  It  is  far  from  universally  accepted  that  a  good  visual  artist  needs  to  be  a   good  draftsman,  or  a  draftsman  at  all.    To  be  sure,  there  is  a  longstanding  view  to   that  effect,  but  it  is  controversial.    In  the  nineteenth  century,  the  aesthetician  John   Ruskin  declared  that  to  draw  is  to  “learn  how  to  see,”  and  some  twenty-­‐first  century   scholars  agree  that  drawing  is  a  fundamental  ingredient  of  mastery  in  visual  art.    For  

                                                                                                                64

Id. at 22-23.

65

POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK at 16.

28    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     instance,  one  writer  asserts  that  drawing  develops  “visual  thinking”  and  another   “the  ability  to  communicate  ideas  visually.”66     Others,  however,  see  this  approach  as  misguided  essentialism.    “Drawing   actually  teaches  us  how  we  saw  rather  than  how  we  see,”  says  arts  education   scholar  Aileen  Wilson.    “Without  the  act  of  drawing  we  would  not  understand  the   conventions  and  beliefs  we  have  about  seeing  itself.”67  In  this  view,  there  is  no  core   knowledge  or  technique  that  definitively  constitutes  visual  art  or  the  boundary   between  art  and  other  activities,  and  drawing  does  not  impart  any  special   imprimatur  of  artistic  competence.    In  short,  the  question  whether  and  how  being  a   good  draftsman  might  be  important  for  making  good  abstract  art  (when  making   abstract  art  does  not  apparently  require  drafting)  would  seem  to  be  as  complex  and   contested  as  the  question  why  judges  should  continue  to  use  doctrine  when  it  does   not  determine  legal  results.     So  far,  then,  legal  art  accounts  have  failed  to  provide  much  beyond  the  basic   observation  that  judicial  decision  making  has  something  in  common  with  certain   aesthetic  practices  with  shared  histories,  traditional  techniques  and  cultural   debates.  Nevertheless  the  comparison  of  doctrinal  reasoning  and  aesthetic   techniques  seems  pregnant  with  possibility.  Most  important,  comparing  the  role  of   doctrinal  reasoning  to  artists’  methods  shifts  the  focus  away  from  judicial  outcomes   and  offers  another  plausible  locus  of  doctrinal  effect:  judges  themselves.  Comparing                                                                                                                   66

Fava at 131.

67

Email on file with the author.

29    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     doctrinal  reasoning  to  artists’  techniques  suggests  the  possibility  that  doctrinal   reasoning  could  affect  its  practitioners  in  ways  that  benefit  their  decision  making   without  contributing  substantively  to  any  given  decision  they  produce.    And  it   suggests  that  one  way  to  explore  that  role  might  be  to  consider  similarities  between   doctrinal  reasoning  and  specific  aesthetic  practices.     In  Part  III  of  this  essay,  I  offer  one  such  exploration,  comparing  doctrinal   reasoning  and  the  techniques  performers  use  to  disrupt  their  ordinary  subjective   responses  in  order  to  play  characters.    That  disruptive  account  could  be  seen  as  an   extension  of  the  legal  art  accounts  I  have  sketched  here.    Before  proceeding  with   that  account,  however,  I  want  to  highlight  some  recent  empirical  research  suggests   that  working  with  doctrine  may  have  psychological  effects  on  legal  decision  makers.     II. Empirical Models of Doctrine’s Role Despite doctrine’s central role in mainstream conceptions of legal reasoning, empirical studies of judicial decision making long relegated doctrinal reasoning to the margins. As Lawrence Baum puts it, up until the 1990s, most empirical studies of judicial behavior assumed that the primary basis for judges’ decisions was their conscious “personal policy preferences,” and ascribed “little or no impact to legal considerations.”68 Following the Legal Realists, empirical researchers set out to study the extent to which non-doctrinal factors, particularly ideology and cultural bias, influenced judicial decision                                                                                                                 68

Lawrence Baum, Motivation and Judicial Behavior: Expanding the Scope of Inquiry, in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDICIAL DECISION MAKING 4-5, DAVID KLEIN & GREGORY MITCHELL ED. (2010).

30    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     making. Over the past 50 years or so, these studies have produced a “mountain of evidence” that judges’ political and cultural views do affect their decisions and precious little information about the role of doctrine. 69 To be sure, judicial behavior researchers never claimed to have shown that legal doctrine was insignificant. Indeed, while testing ideological influences, many of these studies appear to take for granted some doctrinal effect. But until recently, the stories of legal decision making that emerged from empirical studies rarely if ever featured doctrine in a central role. And even if doctrine was presumed to play some part in judges’ reasoning, there was little interest in investigating how legal doctrines affected the decision makers who avowedly applied them. More recently, however, two trends have combined to produce research aimed at understanding whether and how “law matters” in judicial outcomes.70 First, empirical                                                                                                                 69

David Klein, Law in Judicial Decision Making (2015). See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Segal & Albert D. Cover, Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 83   Am.   Pol.   Sci.   Rev.   557   (1989);   Jeffrey   A.   Segal   &   Harold   J.   Spaeth,   The   Supreme   Court   and   the   Attitudinal   Model   (1993);   Jeffrey   A.   Segal   &   Harold   J.   Spaeth,   The   Supreme   Court   and   the   Attitudinal   Model   Revisited (2002); Donald R. Songer & Sue Davis, The Impact of Party and Region on Voting Decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals, 1955-1986, 43 W. Pol. Q. 317 (1990) (discussing “significant differences in the voting patterns of Democratic and Republican judges on a wide spectrum of issues”); Cass   Sunstein   et   al.,   Are   Judges   Political?   An   Empirical   Analysis   of   the   Federal   Judiciary 147 (2006) (“Republican appointees differ from Democratic appointees. . . . [W]e see significant differences in such areas as campaign finance legislation, affirmative action, . . . labor law, and much more.”); Tracey E. George, Developing a Positive Theory of Decisionmaking on U.S. Courts of Appeals, 58 Ohio  St.  L.J. 1635, 1640 (1998) (Under this theory, we can predict circuit court judicial behavior in en banc cases based on the judges’ policy preferences . . . and/or their compulsion to win . . . .”).

70

Michael D. Gilbert, Does Law Matter? Theory and Evidence from Single-Subject Adjudication, 40 J. LEGAL STUD. 333 (2011). See also, Pauline T. Kim, Lower Court Discretion, 82 N.Y.U. L. REV. 383, 429 (2007) (“Some [lower courts] may be more likely to see their decisions as bound by higher court precedent, while others will read those decisions narrowly, leaving them substantial discretion to decide the issue before them.”); Sara C. Benesh & Malia Reddick, Overruled: An Event History Analysis of Lower Court Reaction to Supreme Court Alteration of Precedent, 64 J. POL.

31    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     legal scholars have shifted away from a framework that conceives of judicial decision making entirely as a matter of conscious strategy. Following decades of psychological research, judicial behavior studies have begun to consider the importance of unconscious cognitive processes in legal decision making.  71   Some recent studies test models of legal reasoning that include the influence of “implicit” or unconscious biases or “motivated thinking” that have repeatedly been shown to be prevalent in all sorts of decision making.72 Second, a number of empirical legal researchers have apparently realized that persistently treating judges’ use of doctrine as either a false explanation or a background condition has only served to further mystify doctrine’s role. The result is a new body of research that incorporates a more complex psychological view of legal decision makers and attempts to observe how decision makers engage with legal authorities. Some recent experimental studies focus on decision makers’ use of legal authorities to resolve

                                                                                                                71

Outside the political science study of judicial behavior, there have long been models of judicial decision making that reach outside conscious reasoning, notably Joseph Hutcheson’s “hunch” theory. Joseph C. Hutcheson, Jr., The Judgment Intuitive: The Function of the “Hunch” in Judicial Decision, 14 CORNELL L. REV. 274 (1929). See KARL LLEWELLYN, THE COMMON LAW TRADITION: DECIDING APPEALS (1960). See also, Chad M. Oldfather, Of Judges, Law and the River: Tacit Knowledge and the Judicial Role, 2015 J. DISPUTE RESOL. 155 (2015) (discussing Hutcheson, Llewellyn, and Paul Carrington’s essay comparing legal reasoning with the navigation knowledge of river pilots, as described by Mark Twain: Paul D. Carrington, Of Law and the River, 34 J. LEGAL EDUC. 222 (1984)). 72  

See, EILEEN BRAMAN, LAW, POLITICS, & PERCEPTION 30 (2009); Dan   M.   Kahan,   David   Hoffman,   Danieli   Evans,   Eugene   Lucci,   and   Katherine   Cheng,   ‘Ideology’   or   ‘Situation   Sense’?   An   Experimental   Investigation   of   Motivated   Reasoning   and   Professional   Judgment,   164   PENN.   L.   REV.   349   (2016);   Ward Farnsworth, Dustin Guzior and Anup Malani, Policy Preferences and Legal Interpretation, J. Law and Courts (2013); Ward Farnsworth, Dustin Guzior and Anup Malani, Implicit Bias in Legal Interpretation (2011); Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Andrew J. Wistrich, & Chris Guthrie, Does Unconscious Racial Bias Affect Trial Judges?, 84 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 1195 (2009); Eileen Braman & Thomas E. Nelson, Mechanism of Motivated Reasoning? Analogical Perception in Discrimination Disputes, 51 AM. J. POLI. SCI. 940 (2007); Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey Rachlinski & Andrew J. Wistrich, Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, 93 CORNELL L. REV. 101 (2007). See also, Kang et al., Implicit Bias in the Courtroom, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1124 (2012).

32    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     hypothetical legal cases designed to trigger participants’ subjective biases.73 These experiments provide evidence that in some circumstances the ways decision makers engage with legal authorities may influence how their subjective biases are implicated in their decisions. At first glance it might seem that applying the insights of cognitive psychology to judging would further deemphasize the role of doctrinal authorities. After all, considering the ways legal reasoners might be subject to the sorts of unconscious biases that plague decision making in other contexts takes us even farther from the ideal of the judge who applies the law objectively as given, unmoved by her own preferences. In fact, though, adopting a more complex psychological approach to judicial behavior seems to have had the opposite effect. Studies aimed at testing the influence of unconscious biases have tended to draw more attention to judges’ engagement with legal authorities. On reflection, that is not surprising. So long as empirical models were polarized between judges who deliberately pursued their own ideologically preferred outcomes while pretending to follow the law (the “attitudinal” and “strategic” models) and judges who sincerely applied the law (the “legalist” model), there was no reason to imagine how the process of doctrinal reasoning affected outcomes. In these models, a judge either followed the law or didn’t. But once empirical legal models embraced unconscious motivation, it became obvious that a judge might both be committed to following the law

                                                                                                                73

See e.g., Gilbert supra note

.

33    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     and influenced by cultural and political biases.74 Cognitive psychological theories of unconscious bias could explain how judicial results could track judges’ subjective preferences even if judges were diligently attempting to follow legal doctrine. That raised the question of how judges’ engagement with legal authorities might interact with their subjective preferences. Several of the studies in this new wave of empirical legal research have turned up results that the researchers interpret as evidence that engaging in formal legal decision making may contribute to depressing the effects of cognitive biases. This interpretation is something other than a return to pre-Realist beliefs in the power of doctrinal arguments to convince decision makers that a particular result is uniquely correct. All of these researchers embrace the idea that people are rarely rationally persuaded to move away from consciously held views with which they strongly identify. As a matter of cognitive psychology, there is more and more evidence that people are unlikely to be convinced to change their minds by substantive argument.75 Moreover, it is not as though we share the same view of positive reality and disagree only on normative questions about ideology, morality and policy. Instead, it seems our normative beliefs shape our understanding of reality, and thus lead us to see the same real-world phenomena quite differently. Insome                                                                                                                 74

EILEEN BRAMAN, LAW, POLITICS AND PERCEPTION 29 (2009). As Laurence Baum points out, “the concept of motivated reasoning provides a way to understand how judges’ policy preferences could influence their choices in a less than fully conscious way.” 75

See Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman and Gregory Mandel, The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks, 2 NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE 732 (2012); D. J. O'Keefe, Social Judgment Theory. In PERSUASION: THEORY AND RESEARCH, 29-44 (1990); Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Choices, Values & Frames, 39 AMER. PSYCHOLOGIST 341 (1984).

34    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Some recent empirical research has focused on this conflation of positive and normative judgment in a legal decision making context. 76 Much of this work confirms that decision makers’ attitudes affect their perceptions and interpretations of legal authorities. As Eileen Braman and Thomas E. Nelson put it, “participants with diverging opinions saw the very same cases in systematically different ways.”77 Nevertheless, some of this research also suggests that legal decision makers can sometimes avoid understanding legal authority only in ways that confirm preexisting views. I want to highlight in particular two studies that suggest that doctrine may contribute to legal reasoning in ways not entirely dependent on conscious substantive direction. A. Two Recent Studies of Doctrinal Effects In a 2007 article, Guthrie, Rachlinski and Wistrich proposed an alternative to the attitudinal-strategic v. legalist models undergirding most empirical research on judicial behavior.78 Rather than concentrating on judges’ deliberate attempts to either impose their own policy preferences or obediently follow legal doctrine, they focused on cognitive processes involved in legal decision making. Their hypothesis was a variation of the “dual process” theories from cognitive psychology, that distinguish between intuitive, or, “system 1,” processes and deliberative, or, “system 2,” processes (also

                                                                                                                76

Ward Farnsworth, Dustin Guzior, & Anup Malani, Policy Preferences and Legal Interpretation, 1 J. L. & COURTS 115, 128 (2013). 77

Braman & Nelson supra note at .

78

Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey Rachlinski & Andrew J. Wistrich, Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, 93 CORNELL L. REV. 101 (2007).

35    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     sometimes called “fast” and “slow” thinking).79 In their own words, “this model posits that judges generally make intuitive decisions but sometimes override their intuition with deliberation.”80 Using this model, Guthrie et al conducted two experiments designed to see whether trial judges were subject to so-called “hindsight bias,” i.e., the “welldocumented tendency to overestimate the predictability of past events,” which has been shown to influence decision makers at an unconscious level.81 In one experiment, the researchers gave a group of sitting trial judges a short description of a prisoner’s pro se complaint alleging a violation of Section 1983, told them the outcome of the case in the trial court and on appeal, and then asked the judges to predict, “in light of the facts of the case,” which of three appellate outcomes was most likely. The results indicated judges’ predictions were affected by what they had been told was the actual outcome on appeal, indicating hindsight bias was at work. For instance, of judges told that the court had affirmed, 81.5% said they would have predicted affirmance, compared with only 27.8% of judges told the court had vacated. Conversely, 51.9% of those told the court had vacated said they would have predicted that result, compared with only 11.1% of judges told the court had affirmed.82 As Guthrie et al conclude,

                                                                                                                79

Id. at 106-12. See DANIEL KAHNEMAN, THINKING FAST AND SLOW (2011); Daniel Kahneman & Shane Frederick, Representativesness Revistied: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment, in HEURISTICS AND BIASES: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTUITIVE JUDGMENT 49 (Thomas Gillovich, Dale Griffin & Daniel Kahneman eds., 2002). See generally, DUAL-PROCESS THEORIES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (Shelly Chaiken & Yaacov Trope eds., 1999). 80

Guthrie et al supra note at 103.

81

Id. at 123.

82

Id. at 125 table 7.

36    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     “[l]earning an outcome clearly influenced the judges’ ex post assessments of the ex ante likelihood of various possible outcomes.”83 In other words, hindsight bias prevailed. In a second study involving an issue of probable cause, however, hindsight had no apparent impact, leading the researchers to conclude “that judges are sometimes capable of resisting hindsight bias.”84 In that study, one group of judges was asked to determine whether they would issue a telephone search warrant based on a hypothetical set of facts, while a second group was asked to rule on a suppression motion for drug evidence found in a warrantless car search based on the same factual circumstances.85 The hypothesis was that judges ruling on the suppression motion would exhibit hindsight bias because of the damning evidence the search had uncovered. But no such hindsight bias appeared. Instead, judges asked to rule on the suppression motion found there had been probable cause to conduct the search at a rate “statistically indistinguishable” from that of the warrant issuing judges, who knew only the facts leading up to the search. Why would judges asked to predict appellate outcomes in a Section 1983/Rule 11 context exhibit hindsight bias while judges asked to rule on probable cause were unaffected? The researchers propose that asking judges for a legal ruling rather than a simple outcome prediction may have triggered a different reasoning method. They note that under any conventional legal approach, a probable cause ruling would entail the judges’ consideration of a familiar body of case law. So directing judges to make a legal                                                                                                                 83

Id. at 125.

84

Id. at 125.

85

Id.

37    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     ruling on probable cause in effect prompted them to consider a complex body of legal doctrine. Using their dual-system model of judicial reasoning, the researchers suggest that doctrinal consideration triggered the kind of slower deliberative reasoning that has been shown in other contexts to reduce the effects of cognitive biases. In contrast, the judges asked to predict appellate outcomes on the dismissal and Rule 11 sanctions may have done so intuitively, using the kind of “fast thinking” notoriously subject to hindsight bias.86 The idea is that something about judges’ engagement with a “web of complex rules” in ways necessary to make a formal legal ruling freed them from the hindsight bias that influenced the judges’ outcome predictions.87 In  a  2016  article,  Dan M. Kahan and colleagues report the results of a series of experiments designed to compare the susceptibility to subjective biases of legal professionals, law students and lay people, and to test whether lawyers and judges are less driven by their subjective biases when they engage in legal decision making than they are in non-legal settings. 88 The researchers hypothesized that when judges and lawyers engage in legal reasoning, “professional  judgment  can  be  expected  to   counteract  ‘identity-­‐protective  cognition’  –  the  species  of  motivated  reasoning  

                                                                                                                86

Id. at 126-28.

87

Id. at 127.

88

Dan M. Kahan, David Hoffman, Danieli Evans, Eugene Lucci, and Katherine Cheng ‘Ideology’ or ‘Situation Sense’? An Experimental Investigation of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment, , http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2590054, forthcoming 164 U. Penn. L. Rev.

38    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     known  to  generate  political  polarization  over  risks  and  myriad  policy  and  legally   consequential  facts.”89   Kahan  et  al.  created  alternate  versions  of  background  facts  for  each  of  two   simulated  lawsuits  designed  to  trigger  different  cultural/political  biases.      The  first   case  involved  a  person  charged  under  a  statute  that  prohibits  “littering,  disposing,   or  depositing  any  form  of  garbage,  refuse,  junk,  or  other  debris”  on  a  national   wildlife  preserve.90    In  one  version  of  the  littering  case,  defendants  were   immigration-­‐aid  workers  who  left  large  plastic  jugs  full  of  water  “along  a  50-­‐mile   stretch  known  to  be  traversed  by  undocumented  migrant  farm  workers  .  .  .  .  who   face  a  high  risk  of  death  by  dehydration  during  attempts  to  cross  the  border.”91    In   the  alternate  version,  the  jugs  were  left  by  construction  workers,  hired  to  build  a   border  fence,  who  “anticipated  drinking  the  water  as  they  completed  their  work   over  a  three-­‐month  period.”92    In  both  versions  of  the  case  defendants  argued  that   they  did  not  permanently  discard  anything  and  only  temporarily  placed  the  jugs  in   the  desert  expecting  them  to  be  used  and  reused,  and  so  their  conduct  did  not  fall   within  the  statute’s  prohibitions.    In  opposition,  the  government  argued  that  the   statute’s  terms  “depositing,”  “junk”  and  “other  debris”  were  broad  enough  to  

                                                                                                                89

Id. at 4.

90

Id. at 21.

91

Id. at 58.

92

Id.

39    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     encompass  the  defendants’  actions.93  The  second  hypothetical  case  involved  an   appeal  of  a  police  officer’s  conviction  for  violating  a  statute  prohibiting  government   employees  from  disclosing  confidential  information.    In  one  version,  the  officer  tells   his  sister  who  works  at  a  non-­‐profit  family  planning  center  that  a  recent  job   applicant  belongs  to  an  anti-­‐abortion  group.    In  the  other  version,  the  officer’s  sister   works  at  a  religious  family  planning  center  that  counsels  on  abortion  alternatives,   and  the  job  applicant  belongs  to  an  abortion  rights  group.94   Research  subjects  included  judges,  lawyers,  law  students  and  members  of  the   general  public  with  no  formal  legal  training.    All  were  asked  to  imagine  they  were   trial  judges  adjudicating  a  motion  to  dismiss,  which  entails  interpreting  the  relevant   statute.    Members  of  the  public  asked  to  decide  the  cases  showed  evidence  of   motivated  thinking  in  line  with  their  previously  tested  political  beliefs.95      The  case   decisions  of  judges  and  lawyers,  however,  showed  significant  consensus  across   ideological  lines.96    Unlike  members  of  the  general  public  or  law  students,  clear   majorities  of  judges  and  lawyers  favored  the  same  results  in  both  versions  of  the   cases.  97                                                                                                                     93

Id.

94

Id. at 22-23.

95

Id. at 28, 30-31.

96

Id. There were some small variations along cultural-political identity lines (established with an attitudinal test taken by the subjects after they responded to the cases).

97

In adjudicating the littering case, over 75% of judges and lawyers found no violation, regardless of which version they were given and what cultural/political orientation they were found to have. The other case produced somewhat less consensus, but there were still clear

40  

 

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     The  differences  between  lawyers  and  judges  and  the  other  experimental   subjects,  however,  did  not  hold  when  they  were  asked  to  make  decisions  outside  the   formal  legal  context.98    In  a  separate  part  of  the  experiment,  Kahan  et  al  asked  their   subjects  to  evaluate  the  salience  of  different  threats  to  society,  in  particular,  risks  of   social  deviancy  and  environmental  damage.99    For  all  the  participants,  lawyers  and   judges  as  well  as  members  of  the  public  and  law  students,  responses  to  this  part  of   the  experiment  showed  patterns  associated  with  identity-­‐protecting  motivated   thinking  correlated  with  the  participants’  observed  ideological  outlooks.100     Whatever  produced  judicial  consensus  across  ideological  lines  in  the  resolution  of   the  hypothetical  legal  cases  did  not  unify  the  judges’  responses  to  social  problems   presented  outside  the  context  of  legal  decision  making.     Kahan  et  al.  explain  their  results  using  a  theory  of  “professional  judgment,”   developed  in  the  work  of  psychologist  Howard  Margolis  and  suggest  that   Llewellyn’s  concept  of  judges’  “situation  sense”  (discussed  supra  as  a  Legal  Art   approach  to  doctrinal  reasoning)  is  a  version  of  the  same  phenomenon.101     Following  Margolis’s  account,  they  theorize  that  “when  judges  decide  cases,  they  are                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             majorities of judges and lawyers who agreed on the correct outcome, regardless of politics. Id. at 31. Law students were somewhere in between. 98

Id. at 40-41.

99

Id. at 23-24.

100

Id. at 41.

101

Id. at 15-16, 25, 45-46. See HOWARD MARGOLIS, DEALING WITH RISK: WHY THE PUBLIC AND THE EXPERTS DISAGREE ON ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES 35 (1996) and HOWARD MARGOLIS, PATTERNS, THINKING AND COGNITION: A THEORY OF JUDGMENT (1985).

41    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     not  merely  engaging  in  conscious,  effortful  information  processing:  they  are   exercising  professional  judgment.”  Margolis  characterizes  this  acquired  professional   ability  as  “habits  of  mind”102  linked  to  pattern  recognition.  In  this  model,  decision   makers’  approach  is  “conscious  and  effortful  to  some  degree,  but  just  as  much  tacit   and  perceptive.”  103    Such  professional  judgment  is  said  to  be  “distinctively  fitted  to   reasoning  tasks  the  nature  of  which  falls  outside  ordinary  experience”  and  thus   operates  only  when  professionals  engage  in  their  distinctive  professional  activities.     Kahan  et  al.,  hypothesize  that  judges’  acquired  professional  habits  of  mind  or   situation  sense  enable  them  to  be  “resistant  to  identity-­‐protective  cognition  when   performing  the  types  of  reasoning  tasks  characteristic  of  their  profession  –  but  not   otherwise.”104   As  Kahan  et  al.  explain,  the  theory  of  professional  judgment  adapted  from   Margolis  is  based  primarily  on  “pattern  recognition.”105    Margolis  describes  the   mental  process  as  “rapid  un-­‐  or  pre-­‐conscious  matching  of  phenomena  with   mentally  inventoried  prototypes.”106  So,  for  example,  chess  masters  win,  “not  by   anticipating  and  consciously  simulating  longer  sequences  of  potential  moves  but  by   more  reliably  perceiving  the  relative  value  of  different  board  positions  based  on                                                                                                                   102

Kahan et al. supra note at 14.

103

Id.

104

Id. at 42.

105

Id.

106

Id.

42    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     their  prototypical  affinity  to  ones  that  thousands  of  hours  of  experience  have   revealed  confer  an  advantage  to  one  player  or  another.”107  Applying  this  theory  to   legal  decision  making,  the  Kahan  group  reason  that  judges  likewise  acquire   “specialized  prototypes”  that  enable  them  to  “converge  on  the  recognition  of   phenomena  of  consequence  to  their  special  decision  making  responsibilities.”  108  In   their  view,  these  “shared  prototypes”  acquired  through  legal  education  and  practice   allow  judges  to  “reliably  attend  only  to  the  legally  pertinent  aspects  of  controversies   and  disregard  the  unimportant  ones.”109    Thus,  in  formal  legal  contexts,  judges   “converge  on  consensus  results  despite  a  divergence  of  political  outlooks.”110   B.    Doctrinal  Effects  and  Doctrinal  Determinacy   Both  the  Guthrie  and  Kahan  studies  break  away  from  the  narrow   understanding  of  legal  authorities  as  affecting  practitioners  only  by  directing  them   to  consciously  adopt  particular  substantive  results.    The  researchers  offer  two   different  psychological  models  to  explain  how  engaging  with  legal  doctrine  might   help  legal  reasoners  avoid  biases  that  influence  their  decisions  in  informal  contexts.     Neither  of  these  models  depends  on  the  kind  of  logical  reasoning  or  analogical   comparison  that  are  the  usual  paradigms  of  doctrinal  analysis.    Both  sets  of   researchers  attribute  judges’  observed  ability  to  avoid  bias  in  formal  legal  rulings  to                                                                                                                   107

Id.

108

Id.

109

Id. at 46.

110

Id. at 45.

43    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     something  other  than  their  being  consciously  persuaded  by  the  substance  of  legal   doctrinal  rules.           Guthrie  et  al  point  to  the  difference  in  the  way  the  participants  in  their  two   experiments  were  prompted  to  interact  with  legal  authorities.    They  suggest  that   being  asked  to  predict  how  others  would  rule  in  the  Section  1983  case  did  not   require  judges  to  engage  with  doctrine  in  the  formal  conventional  mode  necessary   to  make  and  explain  a  legal  ruling.    In  contrast,  the  probable  cause  judges  were   asked  to  make  their  own  legal  rulings,  so  they  presumably  approached  the  legal   authorities  as  if  they  were  themselves  adjudicating  the  case.    In  their  view,  formal   doctrinal  reasoning  requires  a  kind  of  “system  2,”  or,  “slow”  thinking,  which  is   widely  thought  to  override  or  correct  heuristic  biases  that  are  deployed  in  “system   1,”  intuitive  cognition.       The  Guthrie  group’s  explanation  is  consistent  with  doctrinal  indeterminacy,   because  it  does  not  depend  on  the  substance  of  doctrine.    Rather,  these  researchers   hypothesize  that  it  is  the  “complexity,”  of  the  relevant  body  of  legal  authority  that   produced  the  observed  shift  away  from  cognitive  bias.    They  propose  that  trafficking   with  the  complex  web  of  doctrinal  authorities  induced  a  decision  making  approach   that  triggered  the  kind  of  slow  thinking  thought  to  help  avoid  cognitive  bias.       At  first  glance,  the  Kahan  group’s  theory  of  how  the  judges  in  their  study   avoided  biased  thinking  when  engaged  in  formal  legal  reasoning  seems  similarly   non-­‐substantive.    Certainly  their  model  of  judges’  “pattern  recognition”  does  not   involve  the  kind  of  deliberate,  conscious  application  of  doctrinal  content  to  specific   44    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     facts  that  is  typical  of  most  descriptions  of  legal  reasoning.    Indeed,  the  Kahan   group’s  model  seems  even  farther  removed  from  classical  depictions  of  legal   reasoning  than  the  Guthrie  group’s  model  because  it  focuses  on  pre-­‐conscious   perception  of  patterns  rather  than  logical  deduction  or  analogical  comparison  with   precedent.      One  might  therefore  assume  that  the  Kahan  theory  is  likewise   compatible  with  doctrinal  indeterminacy.    But  the  Kahan  group’s  model  of   professional  judgment  can  only  work  if  something  in  fact  identifies  one  outcome  as   objectively  preferable  to  legal  professionals.     Kahan  et  al  hypothesize  that  through  training  and  experience  judges  have   internalized  “specialized  prototypes”  that  allow  them  to  recognize  legally   “pertinent”  patterns  and  disregard  legally  irrelevant  aspects  of  a  scenario  that  could   trigger  personal  biases.  As  they  explain,  following  Margolis’s  theory,  the  deployment   of  this  expert  judgment  takes  place  at  a  not  entirely  conscious  level,  more  as  a  kind   of  perception  than  reasoning.    In  the  process,  legal  decision  makers’  ability  to   recognize  salient  legal  patterns  immunizes  them  from  “the  distorting  influence  that   identity  protective  cognition  exerts”  by  fixing  “their  attention  on  pertinent  elements   of  case  ‘situation  types.’”  111    The  focus  on  perceiving  patterns  and  prototypes  rather   than  analyzing  substantive  rules  at  first  seems  to  avoid  the  need  for  doctrinal   determinacy.    But  on  reflection,  it  is  unclear  how  legal  professionals  could  identify   legally  relevant  aspects  of  a  situation  without  the  shared  knowledge  that  the   available  doctrine  provides  determinate  rules  that  distinguish  those  aspects  of  the                                                                                                                   111

Kahan et al. supra note at 16.

45    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     situation  at  hand.    At  least  the  “professional  judgment”  account  offers  no   explanation  for  how  shared  legal  “prototypes”  could  move  legal  decision  makers   away  from  their  subjective  views  other  than  by  substantive  direction  of  legally   correct  results.    But  once  again,  this  conflicts  with  the  consensus  among  legal   professionals  that  in  many  if  not  most  cases  that  are  adjudicated,  the  available   doctrinal  authorities  do  not  make  one  outcome  objectively  more  correct.       Moreover,  it  is  possible  to  use  the  available  doctrinal  authority  the  Kahan   group  provided  to  plausibly  ground  alternative  outcomes  in  at  least  one  of  their   scenarios.  Indeed,  the  actual  adjudication  of  a  case  with  facts  very  similar  to  one  of   the  Kahan  group’s  hypotheticals  demonstrates  this  result  in  practice.    United  States   v.  Millis  involved  the  application  of  a  federal  statute  forbidding  littering  on  federal   land.112    The  defendant  was  an  aid  worker  who  left  plastic  bottles  in  the  Arizona   desert  for  use  by  undocumented  migrants.113    He  was  convicted  by  a  district  judge,   but  a  divided  Ninth  Circuit  panel  reversed  his  conviction.    The  two  Democratic   appointees  on  the  panel  found  that  the  statutory  term  “garbage”  was  “sufficiently   ambiguous”  in  context  to  trigger  the  rule  of  lenity  that  requires  narrow  construction   of  criminal  statutes.114  They  therefore  held  that  the  defendant’s  conduct  could  not   ground  a  conviction  under  the  statute.  The  Republican  appointee  on  the  panel                                                                                                                   112

621 F.3d 914 (9th Cir. 2010).

113

Id. at 915.

114

Id. at 918. Judge Sidney R. Thomas (who authored the opinion) was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1996; Judge M. Margaret McKeown was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by Clinton in 1998.

46    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     dissented.115  In  his  view,  “the  rule  of  lenity  does  not  apply  here  because  leaving   plastic  bottles  in  a  wildlife  refuge  is  littering  under  any  ordinary  common  meaning   of  the  word.”116    He  therefore  would  have  upheld  the  conviction.    Thus  two  federal   judges  –  the  trial  judge  and  the  dissenting  appellate  judge  interpreted  the  relevant   authority  to  produce  a  conviction  while  two  other  judges,  the  appellate  majority,   read  the  doctrine  to  require  acquittal.    Of  course,  one  might  conclude  that  one  of   these  pairs  is  an  outlier,  made  up  of  unusually  ideologically  motivated  legal  decision   makers  who,  consciously  or  not,  continue  to  be  guided  by  ideological  or  partisan   preferences.  Nevertheless,  the  doctrinally  crafted  majority  and  dissenting  Ninth   Circuit  opinions  show  that  it  is  entirely  possible  to  justify  alternative  results  in   respectable  doctrinal  terms.       Going  back  to  the  example  of  chess  players’  knowledge  of  board  moves  may   help  explain  why  Margolis’s  theory  of  pattern  recognition  cannot  entirely  explain   the  legal  consensus  Kahan  et  al.  observed.    Margolis  observes  that  experienced  chess   players  recognize  board  configurations  as  advantageous  or  problematic  to  their   game.117    By  analogy,  Kahan  et  al.  posit  that,  like  chess  players,  judges  come  to   recognize  features  of  factual  scenarios  that  confer  distinctive  legal  advantages  or   difficulties.    But  there  is  a  crucial  difference.    Chess  players  can  identify  objectively   advantageous  or  problematic  board  positions  because  they  all  agree  about  how  the                                                                                                                   115

Judge Jay Bybee was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by George W. Bush in 2003.

116

Id. at 919 (Bybee, J., dissenting).

117

MARGOLIS, PATTERNS 104-05.

47    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     game  pieces  can  be  moved,  and  on  the  limited  outcomes  that  count  as  winning  the   game.    Players  have  discretion  to  choose  the  overall  strategies  and  select  the  moves   they  believe  will  win.    But  they  cannot  change  the  basic  ways  the  pieces  move  –  a   bishop  always  moves  diagonally,  and  checkmate  is  an  identifiable  board  pattern  that   cannot  be  contested.    Unlike  chess  players,  however,  judges  can  use  doctrines  in   unorthodox  and  creative  ways  in  order  to  produce  a  desired  result  that  might  not  be   predictable,  but  that,  once  produced,  will  be  recognized  by  all  as  legally  valid  and   well  crafted.      Faced  with  the  legal  cases  Kahan  et  al.  designed,  judges  and  lawyers   might  well  disagree  about  the  best  application  of  available  legal  doctrine,  and  be   able  to  use  that  doctrine  to  ground  opposing  results,  as  did  the  Ninth  Circuit   judges.118     The  conflict  with  doctrinal  indeterminacy  should  not  obscure  the  importance   of  the  Kahan  group’s  experimental  results,  which  offer  remarkable  evidence  that   there  is  something  judges  do  when  undertaking  formal  legal  reasoning  that  tends  to   make  them  shed  the  subjective  biases  that  inform  their  decision  making  in  informal   contexts.    If  anything,  the  move  away  from  those  biases  is  even  more  impressive  if  it   is  not  the  result  of  a  confrontation  with  clear  authority  that  points  in  only  one   direction.  What  could  account  for  judges’  application  of  doctrinal  frameworks  to   produce  decisions  out  of  line  with  their  ordinary  individual  ideological  outlooks   when  they  could  credibly  deploy  the  same  doctrines  to  reach  outcomes  consistent                                                                                                                   118

Indeed in the real life case that appears to be the prototype of one version of the hypothetical littering case in the experiment, the real panel of three judges produced a split decision. United States v. Millis, 621 F.3d 914 (2010).

48    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     with  their  subjective  preferences?  Where  doctrines  do  not  identify  uniquely  correct,   or  better,  outcomes,  we  need  some  other  account  of  the  mechanism  through  which   working  with  doctrinal  legal  authority  induces  judges  to  give  up  their  motivated   thinking.       One  possibility  would  seem  to  be  the  dual-­‐process  theory  advanced  by   Guthrie  et  al.    But  as  Dan  Kahan  has  pointed  out,  the  “system  2”  slow  thinking  to   which  Guthrie  et  al  attribute  the  defeat  of  hindsight  bias  in  their  experiment  has   elsewhere  been  shown  repeatedly  to  increase  not  decrease  identity-­‐protective   motivated  thinking.    So  where  doctrine  is  indeterminate,  there  is  still  a  theoretical   gap  in  understanding  whether  and  how  working  with  legal  authority  might  lead   judges  to  shift  away  from  their  ordinary  subjective  political  and  cultural   perspectives.     III. Character Work: Doctrinal Reasoning for Self Disruption What is the talent of the actor? It is the art of counterfeiting himself, or putting on another character than his own, of appearing different than he is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what he does not think as naturally as if he really did think it, and finally, of forgetting his own place by dint of taking another’s.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau119 I want to suggest  a  model  that  harks  back  to  the  legal  art  theories  of  judicial   decision  making  that  I  discussed  in  Section  I.    In  particular,  I  will  consider doctrinal reasoning as a kind of performance practice, analogous to techniques actors use to change                                                                                                                 119

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF ROUSSEAU, VOL. 10 at 309 (ed. & trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth & Christopher Kelly) (2004).

49    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     their ordinary responses to stimuli, in order to play characters. Performers know that by making formal choices to adopt different vocal and physical patterns they can temporarily disrupt their habitual ways of engaging with the world around them, and so develop the ability to behave, and feel, different from their ordinary selves.120 As the performance artist Martha Wilson puts it, “you have to consciously put yourself in that body position in order to get into the mental state you want to be in.”121 I propose that the practice of doctrinal reasoning might have a similarly disruptive effect in judges’ ordinary outlook. Because doctrinal reasoning requires legal decision makers to adopt distinctive formal ways of reading, thinking, talking and writing that are unlike the decision makers’ habitual modes of these activities, doctrinal reasoning might function something like the estranging physical choices performers make in order to play characters.   At  first,  judges’  doctrinal  reasoning  might  not  seem  to  involve  anything  like   the  embodied  choices  actors  use  to  build  characters.    On  reflection,  however,   doctrinal  reasoning  does  entail  engaging  with  unusual  formal  verbal  patterns  that   would  seem  to  require  something  extraordinary  on  a  sensory,  perceptual,   behavioral  level.  Moreover,  recent  psychological  studies  have  produced  evidence   that  a  paradigmatic  embodied  activity  of  legal  decision  making  today  –  reading  –   elicits  significant  psychological  changes  attributed  to  differential  formal  aspects  of  

                                                                                                                120

See Jessie Allen, Blind Faith and Reasonable Doubts: Investigating Belief in the Rule of Law,” 24 SEATTLE L. REV. 691, 706 (2001). See also, Jessie Allen, Theory of Adjudication: Law as Magic, 41 SUFFOLK U. L. REV. 773, 821-25 (2008). 121

Angeli Sion, Wearing Personalities, Expanding Emotional Territories – In Conversation with Martha Wilson, INCIDENT MAGAZINE, APRIL 2016.

50    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     text.122    If  reading  produces  cognitive  and  affective  changes  attributable  to  different   literary  forms,  that  suggests  that  reading,  writing  and  thinking  in  the  distinctive   legal  doctrinal  forms  may  have  equally  significant  psychological  effects,  unrelated  to   doctrine’s  ability  to  determine  substantive  legal  outcomes.   I  recognize  that  doctrinal  analysis  is  generally  conceived  as  antithetical  to  the   sort  of  work  required  of  actors.   To  the  extent  an  actor’s  outlook  changes  in  the   process  of  characterization,  it  moves  toward  another  particular  subjective  point  of   view.    In  contrast,  legal  reasoning  is  classically  regarded  as  moving  away  from   subjectivity  toward  an  objective  mode  of  thinking  that  proceeds  from  general  rules   and  abstractions  and  eschews  flesh  and  blood  perspectives.    As  one  of  my  colleagues   commented,  “one  is  innately  personalized  and  the  other  assumes  the  absence  of   actual  people.”123    This  sort  of  rule  based  objectivity,  however,  is  exactly  what  a   wealth  of  critical  and  empirical  analysis  has  taught  us  is  not  in  fact  achievable  by   human  decision  makers  –  in  law  or  anywhere  else.     With the model of a performer in mind, we could see judges’ turn away from their usual outlooks as meaningful, even if doctrine ultimately fails to direct decision makers’ substantive conclusions. To see this, however, we have to shift our attention away from the substantive results of doctrinal analysis and focus instead on doctrinal reasoning as a                                                                                                                 122  

See, e.g., David Comer Kidd & Emanuele Castano, Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind, 342 SCIENCE 377, 377 (2013) (describing a series of experiments to see whether reading different types of material correlated with the ability to perform certain cognitive tasks). See also P. Matthijs Bal & Martijn Veltkamp, How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation, 8 Pub. Libr. Sci. ONE 1 (2013) (finding that reading fiction can affect the reader’s empathy levels).

123

Haider Hamoudi, personal communication with the author.

51    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     formal practice. In this view, the prescribed legal-professional techniques of interacting with authoritative sources in their distinctive forms, using approved methods, such as analogizing and distinguishing precedents and reading statutory and constitutional text in prescribed ways, might help judges’ step outside of their ordinary viewpoints. Formal doctrinal reasoning forces its practitioners to go through certain prescribed perceptual and behavioral steps that are different from their informal non-legal decision making process. Likewise performers are required to adopt certain particular behavioral changes in order to play a character, or for that matter, to “perform” at all. Indeed, all performance requires something like what Frederick Schauer describes as “a route toward reaching a decision other than,” the way performers or legal decision makers would choose to act “if left to our own devices.”124 A. Performance as Estrangement from the Ordinary Self The doctrinal disruption of legal reasoners’ usual subjective outlook reminds me of the techniques performers use to elicit psychological shifts that facilitate portrayals of characters. Setting aside one’s usual way of going about things is central to all performance. As the performance theorist and director Richard Schechner points out, “Performance behavior isn’t free and easy.”125 Thus, the performed role never “wholly

                                                                                                                124

Schauer at 7. Schauer has long stressed the peculiarity of the aspect of legal reasoning that seems designed to lead decision makers “away for their own best judgment,”124 to interfere with conclusions judges would ordinarily adopt—even, perhaps especially, conclusions they are very sure are right.124 The very oddity of this experience, Schauer argues, can help constitute a separate institutional domain of legal reasoning. 125

RICHARD SCHECHNER, BETWEEN THEATER AND ANTHROPOLOGY 118 (1985).

52    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     ‘belongs to’ the performer.”126 For actors playing characters onstage, this distancing or reshaping of the ordinary self is central. As the acting teacher Michael Chekhov puts it, “The desire and the ability to transform oneself are the very heart of the actor’s nature.”127 In theory, an actor might survey all the scenes in which his character appears and plot out each moment of his performance, consciously selecting every move, gesture, and inflection to build a continuous portrayal of a character different from the actor’s ordinary self. This deliberate approach would be unlikely to succeed, however, because it is practically impossible to calculate in advance how a fully imagined character will act and react at every second of a lengthy performance. Instead, actors need to find a way to change their own characteristic behavior that will allow them to respond to events and interactions in ways that are different from their ordinary behavior. One technique for accomplishing this change is to adopt a few deliberate, often very subtle, physical and vocal changes. For instance, an actor might take on an accent, or change the way she holds her head. Sometimes wearing unfamiliar clothes or shoes helps. It turns out that such shifts have ripple effects that alter the way one perceives and responds to outside stimuli, and so can change a performer’s ordinary ways of acting and reacting. For that matter, it is not only actors who experience the psychologically transformative effects of formal external choices. As one guide to acting notes, “You feel -- and act – like a different person” in different types of clothing, and when “children                                                                                                                 126

Id.

127

MICHAEL CHEKHOV, ON THE TECHNIQUE OF ACTING 99 (ED. MEL GORDON, 1991)

53    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     dress up in their parents’ clothes,” they transform.128 An actor learns to nurture and develop these reactions. The goal is to produce a combination of conscious and unconscious responses to the original formal change, to “allow the intuitive feelings which these things inspire within him to take hold and to fashion, almost without his will, mental and physical adjustments.”129 Those secondary psychophysical effects constitute a shift away from the performer’s habitual mode of acting and reacting in the world. Thus a change in subjective identification develops in rehearsal and performance out of the deliberate formal changes to vocal and physical behavior. B.

Doctrinal Reasoning as Performed Character Change

An actor’s conscious decision to adopt a different stance, gesture, or vocal style resonates with a judge’s submission to the formal practice of doctrinal reasoning. Just as the actor makes a choice to change some outward form of moving or speaking in order to trigger a more general shift away from her characteristic mode of behavior, a legal reasoner consciously adopts a particular formal mode of reading, writing and thinking in order to shift away from her ordinary subjective perspective and decision making behavior. To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical about the similarity of actors’ character development and doctrinal reasoning. On the surface, doctrinal reasoning seems to have little in common with theatrical performance. It is relatively easy to see the theatrical aspect of the public work judges do in court, but much of judges’ doctrinal reasoning takes place alone and unobserved. Moreover, actors’ techniques involve active                                                                                                                 128

JEROME ROCKWOOD, THE CRAFTSMEN OF DIONYSUS: AN APPROACH TO ACTING 92 (2D ED. APPLAUSE 1992). 129

Id.

54    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     physical choices that seem different from the mostly sedentary activity involved in reading, writing and thinking along doctrinal lines. Nevertheless, performance and doctrinal reasoning have some structural commonalities. 1. Legal Decision Making as Performance One way to understand the performance nature of doctrinal reasoning is through the concept of restored behavior. The term, “restored behavior,” was coined by the director and theorist Richard Schechner to describe the common basis of all performance as a sequence of words, gestures and/or actions that has been identified and fixed in some objective form so that it can be “rearranged and reconstructed” in contexts apart from its origin.130 Restored behavior would include the traditional elements of a wedding ceremony (the bride coming down the aisle on her father’s arm, the exchange of rings, the obligatory questions “do you, …., take this . . .”), or the sequence of actions in an initiation ritual whose origins may be attributed to spiritual ancestors from a timeless prehistory, as well as the scripted lines an actor says that have been spoken by other actors playing the same part in other productions. Restored behavior of one kind or another is central to all performance; indeed “restored behavior is the main characteristic of performance.”131 Restored behavior has the quality of doing something that has been done, seen, practiced, spoken, written or thought before, and that quality is part of what                                                                                                                 131

Id. at 35.

55    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     separates performance from everyday life: “Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is ‘twice behaved behavior’.132 Note, however, that a sequence of restored behavior need not be exactly the same each time it is repeated. A comedian or musician improvising or a couple who writes their own marriage vows are still engaging in restored behavior. They are drawing from a store of conventionally recognized forms, putting together variations on known sequences of actions and verbal patterns -- telling jokes, playing riffs, taking vows – that constitute a performance separated from ordinary life by its formal qualities. 133 The ability to identify and reproduce restored behavior is crucial for the performer’s estrangement from her usual subjective self. “Restored behavior is ‘out there’, ‘distant from me’,” says Schechner. The performer becomes the one who acts like, talks like, thinks like the words and behavior she adopts. “[R]estored behavior is ‘me behaving as if I am someone else’ or ‘as if I am ‘beside myself’.”134 Without a doubt, doctrinal reasoning involves restored behavior on several levels. Legal reasoning and legal outcomes gain authority by repetition and variation of known previous decisions. First, judicial decisions classically follow                                                                                                                 132

Id. at 36.

133

RICHARD SCHECHNER, BETWEEN THEATER AND ANTHROPOLOGY 35-37 (1985)

134

Id. at 37. One might object that this just shows that performers who act out pre-existing scripts or ritual sequences are doing something that is, in a very broad conceptual sense, like following preexisting rules. But, on reflection, the rule following construct simply returns us to where we started, facing the indeterminacy of legal rules, and, indeed, of all rules at the point that we stop to inquire whether we understand what the rule directs. Wittgenstein, Empirical Doctrine.

56    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     a recognizable form – some version of the law student’s IRAC. Moreover, judges draw on preexisting language in statutes, constitutional provisions, and previous court rulings in constructing new decisions. Judicial opinions develop persuasive power and conventional authority through the deployment of these language strips that have been used before in the context of judicial decision making. On a more institutional level, the retrospective focus and formal limits on the use of legal authority are central to the production of decisions that have the authority of law. Only when a judge speaks or writes in conventionally recognized contexts in the formal context of a judicial decision does she produce legally authoritative decisions. Doctrinal forms are part of that context. Without such “twice behaved behavior” a judge’s decision would lack that authority – she would be ‘just talking’ or writing down her thoughts, not generating legal outcomes. 2. Doctrinal Reasoning as an Embodied Practice Actors’ character techniques entail physical and vocal changes, and it is far from obvious that doctrinal reasoning involves any similarly embodied behavior. Indeed, we tend to think of legal reasoning as the opposite of physical action -- reading, writing and thinking instead of doing. We might wonder, then, whether the ‘mental’ activity of reasoning could generate the type of psychological results produced by performers’ embodied actions.135                                                                                                                 135

Of course, reading certain doctrinal content might change the reader’s ideas about issues related to that content. But that is not the effect I am pressing here. Indeed that kind of content-based effect is precisely the kind of substantive effect that I deny doctrine has in the context of our legal system for all the structural reasons I elaborate in Part I of this article.

57    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     Interestingly, in mainstream legal theory, the work of doctrine and the limits of doctrinal reasoning are often described through metaphors of physical space and physical restraint. The trope of “binding” precedent is perhaps the most common expression of the effect of legal doctrine on legal decision makers. Descriptions of doctrine “narrowing” available options and of judges legislating “in the gaps” left by ambiguous statutes are further examples. The idea of legal reasoning as a change and a limit in the way an embodied reasoner sees things, is expressed metaphorically in the familiar icon of blind justice. Brian Tamanaha offers a variation of the optical trope, assimilating the common legal-cultural perspective generated by legal education and immersion in a professional culture to a set of prescription lenses. Tamanaha’s metaphorical glasses have varied tints and magnifications that correspond to the different cognitive frames belonging to individual judges, but “the lenses worn by all American judges share significant commonalities: that obtained from shared indoctrination into the legal tradition and shared indoctrination into the broader community.” 136 Like justice’s blindfold, the glasses are a metaphor, not a claim about the effects of the visualperceptual aspects of legal decision making. Nevertheless the image of legal techniques and culture as a common form of optical prescription lenses put on by judges is suggestive of the literal effect I am considering here. These metaphors may signal a shared intuition that the material, embodied aspect of doctrinal reasoning is significant for legal judgment. Beyond metaphorical comparisons, I want to think about the actual spatio-temporal practice of doctrinal                                                                                                                 136

TAMANAHA, BEYOND THE FORMALIST-REALIST DIVIDE at 188.

58    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     reasoning and consider whether that process might have psychophysical effects on its practitioners. Like the performance techniques Schechner and others describe, doctrinal reasoning is not “free and easy.” It requires intense efforts of focus, at an optical as well as cognitive level. Reading, writing and even thinking in doctrinal forms requires rigorous physical activity of some sort, even if the moves are subtle and unconsciously regulated. Moreover, the physical particulars of reading and writing are understood to elicit significant cognitive effects that vary with formal differences. As Walter Ong puts it, “All writing systems do not have the same psychic or even neuro-physiological structure or effects.”137 The formal structures of doctrinal analysis surely entail a particularly taxing perceptual choreography. How many law students have found themselves needing to adjust their eyeglasses prescription at the end of the first year? I am reminded of the vision therapy exercises my daughter used to have to do after we discovered that left to her own devices she saw all printed text doubled on the page. These exercises involve looking at a set of marks on a surface and visually pulling them together or apart using the muscles in your eyes. If you have ever tried these extremely subtle but strenuous exercises, you will not doubt that reading is a physical practice, and that reading and writing the dense unusual patterns of legal texts might entail a physical adjustment that could lead to perceptual, cognitive and behavioral effects.

                                                                                                                137

Walter J. Ong, Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought, in THE WRITTEN WORD: LITERACY IN TRANSLATION, GREG BAUMANN ED. 34 (1986).

59    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     I am proposing that the exacting formal process of doctrinal analysis may have a cognitive and/or perceptual effect that could change the way judges understand and therefore resolve the situations they adjudicate, not because the rules objectively require a resolution contrary to their usual preference, but because something about doctrinal practice disrupts the subjective perspectives judges would ordinarily employ. The cognitive, perceptual, physical aspects of the strangely formal practice of doctrinal reasoning might act on judges in ways that alter their subjective outlooks, just as the estranging physical choices actors make help them to disengage from their habitual modes of behavior to perform characters that are both “not me and not, not me.”138 In   effect,  I  suggest  that  engagement  with  formal  legal  doctrine  in  conventionally   regimented  styles  is  the  different  pair  of  shoes  the  legal  reasoner  puts  on  to  change   the  way  she  approaches  the  world,  and,  arguably  to  shift  to  a  different  legal   character  with  a  different  mode  of  decision  making.    But  that  is,  again,  a   metaphorical  comparison.    Is  there  any  evidence  that  the  actual  activities  that   doctrinal  reasoners  engage  in  could  trigger  the  sort  of  changes  in  subjective  outlook   that  actors  experience  with  physical,  vocal  and  costume  changes? C.

Reading and “Self-Change”

One important property has come to the fore: literature can facilitate selfchange.  Maja  Djikic  &  Keith  Oatley139

                                                                                                                138

Schechner.

139

Maja Djikic & Keith Oatley, The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication to Changes of the Self, 8 PSYCHOL. AESTHETICS, CREATIVITY & ARTS 498, 498 (2014)

60    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     A recent series of experiments on the psychological effects of reading different forms of literature supports the idea that doctrinal practice might alter a judge’s characteristic outlook. Much of this research springs from attempts to prove that reading literature has a measurable value. There is a particular focus on the idea that reading literary fiction increases readers’ ability to understand and empathize with others.140I want to look at this psychological research from a different, wider angle. What interests me is the evidence that reading different forms of text can induce changes in the way a person views the world, not because of substantive information the text conveys, but through the reader’s interaction with the textual form. Summarizing the experimental results they surveyed, Maya Djikic and Keith Oatley suggest that literary fiction’s “style,” and “figurative expressions” can “involve the reader” in the narrative, in a way that “can temporarily destabilize the personality system.”141 Here is a link between the sorts of obviously embodied behaviors actors use to develop a character and judges’ doctrinal methods. If reading different forms of fiction and non-fiction texts elicited predictable psychological changes in readers, it is possible imagine that reading and writing the peculiar forms of doctrinal legal texts could have outlook-altering effects on legal decision makers. In the reader studies, we have evidence that the most characteristic activity of modern doctrinal reasoning, reading and writing distinctive forms of text, can have                                                                                                                 140

See Maja Djikic & Keith Oatley, The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication to Changes of the Self, 8 PSYCHOL. AESTHETICS, CREATIVITY & ARTS 498 (2014) (surveying recent studies and proposing three psychological aspects of literature that make “self change” possible).

141

Id. at 500.

61    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     disruptive character effects – not because of legal texts’ substantive content, but because of their formal properties. As Djikic and Oatley note, “A striking feature” of the phenomenon dubbed “self-change through literature” is that “the effects are not direct, as occurs with persuasion.”142 It is rather the form, the “art,” of the text that elicits psychological changes in readers. In one set of experiments, subjects read short passages from one of three different literary forms, literary fiction, popular fiction, or non-fiction.143 Afterwards, readers of literary fiction scored better on “theory of mind” tests – which measure ability to understand what others are thinking and feeling. The researchers, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, point out that “existing explanations focused on the content of fiction cannot account for these results.”144 Their experimental subjects read a few paragraphs from different works of literary fiction that varied widely in subject matter, so it was “unlikely that people learned much more about others by reading any of the short texts.”145 Participants who scored higher on theory of mind tests after reading literary fiction than they did before had not read texts explaining how to better understand and empathize with others. Nor did these texts offer arguments in favor of sensitivity to

                                                                                                                142

Djikic & Oatley, supra note at 498.

143

David Comer Kidd & Emanuele Castano, Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind, 342 SCIENCE 377 (2013)

144

Id.

145

Id.

62    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     others. Instead, the researchers theorize that the effects they observed are due to the way literary fiction engages its readers in a kind of “writerly role.”146 Readers must use formal textual cues to “form representations of characters’ subjective states.”147 Kidd and Castano hypothesize that doing this kind of work increased readers’ “capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.”148 They conclude that their subjects’ better scores on theory of mind tests after reading literary fiction resulted not from exposure to any substantive content of the literature, but rather from readers’ engagement with the forms these texts employ, their “systematic use of phonological, grammatical, and semantic stylistic devices,” which enlisted readers in the project of creatively developing fictional characters.149 We would not expect, of course, that the type of psychological effects elicited by legal doctrine would be the same as the effects of reading literary fiction. Indeed, what the experiments with readers appear to demonstrate is that different genres of texts have different effects exactly because of their formal differences. In a pair of experiments, Bal and Veltkamp found that readers “transported” by different types of texts experienced very different psychological effects.150 Bal and Veltkamp define “transportation” as “a                                                                                                                 146

Id. at

147

Id. at

148

Id.

149

Id.

150

P. Matthijs Bal & Marijn Veltkamp, How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation, 8 PLOS ONE, Issue 1 (2013).

63    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative.”151 As they describe it, transportation is akin to what may be colloquially described as getting lost in a book: “People lose track of time and fail to observe events going on around them; a loss of self-awareness may take place.”152 With this experience in mind, they set out to test the hypothesis that reading fiction “will change an individual’s empathy skills only when the reader is emotionally transported in a story.”153 Their results supported their hypothesis: being emotionally transported by fiction correlated with increased empathy skills. They also produced a surprising unlooked for result: transportation by non-fiction correlated with the opposite effect. While highly transported fiction readers were more likely to report greater empathy, empathic skills tended to decrease in readers of newspaper articles who were transported by those texts. 154 To summarize, what these investigations show, then, is that reading even small amounts of text with distinctive forms (e.g., a single short story or a few news articles) correlates with observable changes in readers’ outlooks, and that this type of “self change” through reading is apparently not attributable to substantive information                                                                                                                 151

Id. at 3.

152

Id. at 3

153

Id. at 1. 154  As

Djikic & Oatley point out in their survey of this research, most studies test only fiction and nonfiction prose, but many other forms of writing could be tested. Functional MRI studies found that reading poetry (Keats) activated brain areas associated with introspection and memory, suggesting that significant cognitive effects are not necessarily tied to narrative form but rather more generally to formal aspects texts like rhythm and rhyme.    Djikic  &  Oatley  supra  note    at  500.  Indeed, according to the MRI study’s authors, the activation of these areas is also triggered by music. Id. at 502. 64    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     conveyed by the text. The effects observed appear to be related to the formal aspects of text and to readers’ different subjective experiences in engaging with the text.155 Simply put, engaging in different ways with different literary forms correlates with predictable psychological changes in readers that are not ascribable to what we usually think of as learning from the message conveyed by a text’s content, or being persuaded by the information a text provides. Instead, engaging with a text’s formal properties apparently precipitates shifts in readers’ psychology-- at least temporarily. The reader studies suggest, then, that a paradigmatic activity of legal decision making – reading particular distinctive forms of text -- can produce the sorts of temporary changes in personality that performers deliberately elicit through other sorts of formal physical choices.156 D.    The  Art  of  Doctrinal  Disruption   Given  the  distinctive  formalities  of  doctrinal  text  and  thought,  it  is  possible   that  judges  may  experience  temporary  distancing  from  their  usual  subjective   outlooks  through  doctrinal  reasoning.  Conceivably,  the  embodied  practices  of   reading,  thinking,  talking  and  writing  in  characteristic  legal-­‐doctrinal  forms  could   destabilize  practitioners’  ordinary  subjective  outlooks  in  ways  similar  to  the  effects   observed  in  readers  of  literature  and  character  actors.    This speculative account of doctrinal reasoning as a self-disruptive practice seems related to two types of theories of doctrinal reasoning described in Part I -- the fidelity and legal art approaches. It might                                                                                                                 155

Another study found a significant increase in “cognitive empathy” only for one subgroup of fiction readers – those who scored low on a psychological test of “openness” prior to reading. Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley & Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, Reading Other Minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy, 3 SCI. STUDY OF LIT. 28, 41-42 (2013).

156

Djikic and Oatley, supra note at 500.

65    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     also contribute to explaining the results observed in the Kahan and Guthrie experiments when judges were asked to make formal legal rulings as opposed to deciding issues informally. In common with the fidelity approach, the disruptive account focuses on the attitudes and subjective experience of legal practitioners in the course of doctrinal reasoning. The difference is that the fidelity account, as it has been articulated to date, makes the initial attitude with which a decision maker approaches doctrine definitive of her doctrinal practice. The disruptive account focuses instead on the effects that ongoing practice has on the reasoner. And where the fidelity approach conceives the defining attitudinal approach as a conscious choice, the disruptive account conceives the effects of doctrinal practice as both conscious and unconscious, closer to the realm of perception than persuasion or deliberate choice. The disruptive account connects most clearly with the Legal Art approach to doctrinal reasoning, and could be seen as a further development of that account. Rather than relying on metaphors, the disruptive account makes concrete comparisons between the techniques used by judges and performers and relates them to the empirical studies of readers. At a more conceptual level, a difference lies in the disruptive account’s focus on immediate and temporary psychological effects. The Legal Art theories and the professional judgment model discussed above posit a kind of accumulated intuitive knowledge or skill, from the repeated practice of a technique, whether drawing, sculpting, chess playing or doctrinal reasoning. The judge’s “situation sense” is a kind of intuitively accessed knowledge that develops through the practice of her craft, in the way 66    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     that a sculptor’s ability to work with wood grain or painter’s ability ‘to see’ develops from training and practice. But in the disruptive account, the idea is that the practice produces immediate, transformative – but perhaps temporary – psychological effects, as opposed to some kind of intuitive knowledge. The  disruptive  account  also  connects  with  the  explanations  empirical  legal   researchers  advance  to  explain  experimental  results.    Like  Guthrie  et  al’s  view  that   working  with  a  complex  set  of  rules  somehow  frees  judges  from  hindsight  bias,  the   disruptive  account  focuses  on  interaction  with  the  form  of  doctrine,  rather  than   absorbtion  of  content.    Like  the  Kahan  group’s  theory  of  professional  judgment,  the   disruptive  account  understands  doctrinal  reasoning’s  effects  as  not  entirely   conscious  or  deliberately  chosen  by  the  practitioner.    And  both  accounts  suggest   that  the  effects  of  doctrinal  reasoning  may  be  experienced  more  as  perceptual  shifts   than  as  conscious  deliberation.    Still,  there  are  important  differences.    Crucially,  on   my  account,  the  changes  to  a  reasoner’s  outlook  are  not  the  secondary  result  of   acquired  substantive  knowledge  or  the  ability  to  recognize  objectively  relevant  legal   structures.  Instead,  I  conceive  the  perceptual  shift  elicited  by  doctrinal  practice  as  a   temporary  effect  produced  by  actual  engagement  in  the  formal  practice  of  doctrinal   reasoning,  comparable  to  actors’  subject-­‐disrupting  methods  for  playing  characters.     As  I  understand  it,  the  Kahan  group’s  theory,  following  Margolis,  imagines   professional  judgment  as  a  form  of  acquired  objective  knowledge.    They  emphasize   that  the  gateway  to  and  experience  of  this  knowledge  is  perceptual  and  intuitive,  a   matter  of  “pattern  recognition”  that  is  not  entirely  conscious.    But  the  prototypical   67    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     patterns  that  are  recognized  by  legal  professionals  are  still  understood  to   correspond  to  features  of  the  situations  being  adjudicated  that  are  objectively   recognizable  as  more  or  less  legally  relevant.  Whether  or  not  something  is  relevant   can  only  be  determined  by  applicable  legal  norms.    That  means  that  when  doctrine   is  indeterminate  (assuming  that  doctrine  is  understood  here  to  incorporate  all  the   applicable  sources  of  legal  guidance)  those  prototypes  must  come  from  some  other   source.       In  contrast,  the  disruptive  account  proposes  that  going  through  the  motions   of  doctrinal  legal  analysis  could  trigger  psychological  effects  that  temporarily   disrupt  judges’  characteristic  biases,  whether  or  not  doctrine  is  substantively   determinate.    The  proposed  mechanism  is  similar  to  the  disruption  observed  in  the   readers’  studies  or  deliberately  engineered  by  the  physical  choices  actors  make   when  playing  roles.    It  might  be  that,  like  experienced  actors,  experienced  legal   professionals  have  greater  access  to  these  effects  through  practice.    But  the  basis  of   that  capacity  would  not  involve  accumulated  objective  knowledge,  conscious  or   unconscious.       In  the  disruptive  account  of  legal  decision  making,  it  is  not  necessary  to   believe  that  relevant  legal  rules  dictate  legally  correct  outcomes  to  produce  results   that  run  contrary  to  judges’  ordinary  political  convictions.  Rather  than  leading   decision  makers  to  substantive  outcomes,  doctrinal  reasoning  may  work  at  a   cognitive  level  to  disengage  decision  makers’  ordinary  outlooks.    The  resistance  to   identity  protective  motivated  thinking  the  Kahan  group  observed  in  judges  and   68    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     lawyers  could  be  partly  explained,  then,  by  doctrinal  reasoning’s  tendency  to   disengage  its  practitioners  from  their  ordinary  subjective  identities  through  their   engagement  with  doctrinal  forms,  not  (or  not  only)  from  their  acquired  ability  to   recognize  objectively  relevant  legal  patterns.       C.  Testing  the  Disruptive  Account   So far the hypothesis that judges use of formal doctrinal methods might disrupt their ordinary subjective biases is just that, an untested hypothesis. Given how little attention has been paid to the possibility that doctrinal reasoning could have effects other than directing substantive outcomes, imagining it as a mechanism for psychological effects seems worthwhile in itself. Still, an obvious next step would seem to be empirically testing the disruptive theory. This seems possible using experimental methods like those of Guthrie and Kahan et al. Participants, ideally judges, would be asked to resolve hypothetical conflicts using more or less doctrinal methods. The experimenters would look to see whether working with doctrine affected the decisional outcomes’ correlation with the participants’ previously tested subjective biases. Of  course  it  is  important  to  acknowledge  that  even  if  the  disruptive  account   turns  out  to  be  empirically  supportable,  it  could  not  account  for  the  ultimate   outcomes  judges  choose.    In  this  way  it  is  a  less  ambitious  theory  than  the  other   legal  art  theories  or  the  professional  judgment  approach  urged  by  the  Kahan  group.     The  disruptive  account  proposes  that  doctrinal  reasoning  might  move  legal  decision   makers  away  from  their  usual  subjective  outlooks,  but  it  does  not  attempt  to  explain   where  they  end  up  after  that  initial  disruption.    So  even  if  experiments  support  the   69    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     notion  that  formal  doctrinal  reasoning  can  disrupt  decision  makers’  usual  subjective   outlooks,  that  will  not  explain  how  judges  go  about  –  or  should  go  about  –  selecting   case  outcomes.    The  disruptive  account  could  offer  a  way  that  even  indeterminate   doctrines  could  help  decision  makers  perform  the  crucial  legal  requirement  of   turning  away  from  their  own  personal  judgment.    But  it  could  not  explain  how   judges  decide  outcomes.    As  a  colleague  put  it,  in  the  disruptive  theory  “doctrinal   reasoning  clears  the  stage,  so  to  speak,  but  it  does  not  tell  us  what  belongs  on  the   stage.”157    Note  that  this  limitation  seems  to  be  a  necessary  result  of  the  account’s   consistency  with  doctrinal  indeterminacy.    The  whole  idea  behind  the  disruptive   approach  is  to  imagine  a  way  in  which  doctrine  might  contribute  to  legal  reasoning   even  if  it  does  not  provide  substantive  outcomes.       D.    So  What?   Why should this matter? What difference does it make if doctrine works to alter decision makers’ perspectives through the psychological effects of formal doctrinal practice rather than by dictating substantive results or producing stored knowledge of objectively pertinent legal patterns? Two reasons. First, because the formal-practice account of doctrinal reasoning can coexist with our realistic understanding of doctrine’s indeterminacy. It is widely agreed that legal authority is indeterminate in at least some important legal controversies. A theory of effective but non-substantive doctrinal practice, then, could reconcile judges’ continued resort to doctrinal reasoning with our

                                                                                                                157

Peter Gerhart, email communication.

70    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     recognition that doctrines do not decide cases, and can do so more plausibly than the integrationist, fidelity, and legal art explanations advanced to date. The other reason it is important to know how much the work of legal doctrine depends on actual doctrinal practice, is that doctrinal practice is disappearing.158 The percentage of cases brought to federal courts that actually proceed through full-fledged trial and appellate proceedings has declined to about 1 in 100 overall.159 In state court as well as federal court, the percentage of cases tried has declined precipitously. Most civil cases settle out of court, and most criminal charges are resolved through plea bargains, bypassing judicial analysis of most or all of the legal questions at stake. There has been a commensurate increase in the use of “alternative dispute resolution.” In mediation, a mediator helps the parties resolve the conflict, sometimes without engaging in any formal doctrinal reasoning. Even cases involving politically charged issues, like race and gender discrimination, are more likely to go to arbitration and mediation and to be resolved with much less formal legal analysis. In the case of binding arbitration, at least in commercial cases, there is generally still some doctrinal practice. The arbitrator may produce a written opinion that deals with precedents and interprets relevant legal authorities. But the formality is certainly reduced. Worries that such non-doctrinal forms of legal decision making will erode legal principles are sometimes explained away with the suggestion that informal resolutions

                                                                                                                158

Marc Galanter, A World Without Trials?, 2006 J. Disp. Resol. 7 (2006).

159

Galanter & Frozena, Civil Trials in the Federal Courts.

71    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     take place “in the shadow of the law.”160 The idea is that the parties, or their legal representatives or facilitators are guided by predictions of how the available doctrinal rules would substantively determine the outcome of the dispute, were it to go through a formal doctrinal analysis. That approach assumes that doctrine’s contribution to legal decision making is primarily substantive, providing a repository of knowledge about legal norms that would still inform informal decision making. But what if what doctrine contributes is something to do with the actual practice of doctrinal reasoning. To the extent that doctrine works through psychological effects generated by the practice of formal doctrinal reasoning, foregoing that practice means foregoing legality. Conclusion   Usually, we understand the work of doctrine and its ability to lead us away from our own best judgment as a matter of substantive direction. In the substantive model, we understand the specialness of legal reasoning as a move toward objectivity and abstraction that brings with it the necessary but secondary abandonment of one’s usual personal outlook. But there is another way to understand the “special oddness” of the doctrinal reasoner’s estrangement from her ordinary subjective perspective.161 We can think of doctrinal analysis, not, or not only, as a move toward abstraction and publicly available reasons, or the acquisition of a special ability to pick out legally pertinent aspects of a conflict. In the model of doctrinal practice I am proposing, the work of doctrine has less to do with acquiring substantive legal knowledge or recognizing special                                                                                                                 160

Mnookin & Kornhauser supra note .

161

Schauer, supra note at 7.

72    

Doctrine  as  a  Disruptive  Practice  –  July  2016     legal patterns and more to do with disrupting a legal decision maker’s ordinary ways of thinking. This account suggests that engaging in the formal practice of doctrinal reasoning precipitates a rupture with ordinary subjectivity that is not necessarily occasioned by acquiring a more objective outlook. In other words, “following the rules” may not be only, or even mainly, a matter of being directed to preferable outcomes by the rules’ substance. Instead, the account I am suggesting imagines doctrinal reasoning as a practice of allowing oneself to be led away from one’s ordinary habits of mind by engaging with complex formal legal texts in prescribed manners. Rather than following the rules’ substance to an objectively directed outcome, the disruptive account proposes that engaging with the rules’ forms may lead decision makers away from their habitual subjective biases.

73