Pieter Desmet

Empirical legal research: charting the terrain

In the academic discipline of the law, scholars have traditionally dealt with legal texts by organizing them, analysing their content from an interpretative, hermeneutical perspective and developing coherent arguments on the law while oscillating between logical deduction, inference and normative claims. Some legal scholars tend to search for logic and order in the continuous and disorderly flow of cases, legislative instruments and policy documents. Others focus their work on building philosophical foundations for the law as it stands or on developing an all-encompassing normative theory of just, fair, efficient or viable law. Most will agree that the academic legal discipline holds legal practice close to its heart and that many law scholars explicitly embrace the practice-oriented character of their teaching and research. Others will be more drawn to understanding the law in its social or philosophical context. There are also scholars who study the law in its social context or as a particular domain of social interaction. These scholars often represent legal subdisciplines with an embedded culture of empirical research – be it socio-legal studies, legal psychology, law and economics, criminology or any other type of research of social legal interaction. Today, therefore, a multitude of academic perspectives on the law impress their mark on law schools: there are those who teach and research positive law as a system which is in constant need of taxonomy, categorization and doctrinal evaluation; those who reflect on its theoretical and philosophical foundations; and those who scrutinize the law from an empirical perspective.1

Empirical Legal Research in Action

Empirical legal research is a growing field of academic expertise, yet lawyers are not always familiar with the possibilities and limitations of the available methods. Empirical Legal Research in Action presents readers with first-hand experiences of empirical research on law and legal issues.

Is it Really Not About the Money? Victim Needs Following Personal Injury and Property Loss and Their Relative Restoration Through Monetary Compensation and Apology

Tort law currently debates the value of facilitating apology, particularly in the domain of personal injury litigation, where victims’ immaterial needs are claimed to be neglected by monetary remedies. However, insight on its remedial value is limited, as extant evidence does not yet illuminate 1) which immaterial needs victims experience in tort situations, 2) how prominent these needs are relative to their material needs, 3) how monetary remedies may redress either need, 4) how apologies contribute beyond this, and 5) how this may impact case resolution (i.e., settlement decisions). We present two experimental studies that illuminate these questions by demonstrating that 1) tort victims experience several distinctive immaterial needs (for interpersonal treatment, responsibility taking, punishment, and closure); 2) these needs are relatively less prominent than victims’ material needs, and no more prominent in personal injury cases than following exclusively pecuniary loss; 3) greater monetary compensation enhances the satisfaction of both victims’ material and immaterial needs; 4) apologies further enhance their satisfaction beyond monetary compensation; 5) however, apology had little impact on settlement, which remained mostly contingent on monetary compensation. No indications were found that apologies are especially effective in personal injury cases (relative to exclusively pecuniary loss). Implications are provided for the role of apology in tort law.

Prophets vs. Profits: How Market Competition Influences Leaders’ Disciplining Behavior

In three studies we examined how market competition influences leaders’ willingness to discipline transgressing employees. We found that fierce market competition changes the lens through which ethical transgressions are viewed to an instrumental one. When they have to discipline transgressing employees, leaders in highly competitive markets are more influenced by the profitability of an ethical transgression for the company than those in less competitive markets. Our findings show that that for leaders, profits precede ethics as market competition increases.