How Economists Entered the 'Numbers Game': Measuring Discrimination in the U.S. Courtrooms, 1971-1989

Abstract

The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method, multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool-kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relates to the debates in academia in the 1980s. Finally, by 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.

Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research

“…Indeed, the relationship between critical geography and legal thought reveals a characteristic power imbalance: while geography readily engages with legal theory, law (both as an academic discipline and as an everyday practice) largely ignores the arguments made by geographers. While there have been some excellent analyses about geographers appearing as expert witnesses (Clark, 1991), geography as a discipline has not developed a strategy for gaining courtroom influence – unlike, for example, economics (Chassonnery‐Zaïgouche, 2019). So, far from insurrection, legal geography shares the political condition that Schafran diagnoses for critical urban studies: it is “smart, correct and weak” (2014, p. 322).…”

Statistical Discrimination and the Rationalization of Stereotypes

“…or utility-maximizing individuals (Charles and Guryan 2011;Small and Pager 2020). Although the fundamental assumptions behind these models have changed relatively little in the past four decades (Guryan and Charles 2013), the economic view on discrimination has had significant influence on social scientific debates, legal decisions, corporate practices, and public policy discussions (Ashenfelter and Oaxaca 1987;Chassonnery-Zaïgouche 2020;Dobbin 2001;Rivera 2020).…”