Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin controversia , as a composite of controversus – "turned in an opposite direction".
115-608: In the theory of law , a controversy differs from a legal case ; while legal cases include all suits, criminal as well as civil , a controversy is a purely civil proceeding. For example, the Case or Controversy Clause of Article Three of the United States Constitution ( Section 2 , Clause 1) states that "the judicial Power shall extend ... to Controversies to which the United States shall be
230-592: A probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated. In recent years, the "wisdom of the crowd" phenomenon has been leveraged in business strategy, advertising spaces, and also political research. Marketing firms aggregate consumer feedback and brand impressions for clients. Meanwhile, companies such as Trada invoke crowds to design advertisements based on clients' requirements. Lastly, political preferences are aggregated to predict or nowcast political elections. Non-human examples are prevalent. For example,
345-408: A ' bounded rationality ' – in other words, that most judgments are made using fast acting heuristics that work well in every day situations, but are not amenable to decision-making about complex subjects such as climate change. Anchoring has been particularly identified as relevant in climate change controversies as individuals are found to be more positively inclined to believe in climate change if
460-472: A Party". This clause has been deemed to impose a requirement that United States federal courts are not permitted to cases that do not pose an actual controversy—that is, an actual dispute between adverse parties which is capable of being resolved by the [court]. In addition to setting out the scope of the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, it also prohibits courts from issuing advisory opinions , or from hearing cases that are either unripe , meaning that
575-455: A continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth , 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds. This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as
690-425: A credibility heuristic. Similar effects on reasoning are also seen in non-scientific controversies, for example in the gun control debate in the United States . As with other controversies, it has been suggested that exposure to empirical facts would be sufficient to resolve the debate once and for all. In computer simulations of cultural communities, beliefs were found to polarize within isolated sub-groups, based on
805-585: A dominant social group. Wisdom of the crowd The wisdom of the crowd , or crowd wisdom , is the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age , has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora , Reddit , Stack Exchange , Misplaced Pages , Yahoo! Answers , and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon
920-410: A law, especially when the "particular" law of one's own city was adverse to the case being made, not that there actually was such a law. Aristotle, moreover, considered certain candidates for a universally valid, natural law to be wrong. Aristotle's theoretical paternity of the natural law tradition is consequently disputed. Thomas Aquinas is the foremost classical proponent of natural theology , and
1035-540: A moral virtue derived as the mean between opposing vices, just like every other virtue he describes. His longest discussion of his theory of justice occurs in Nicomachean Ethics and begins by asking what sort of mean a just act is. He argues that the term "justice" actually refers to two different but related ideas: general justice and particular justice. When a person's actions toward others are completely virtuous in all matters, Aristotle calls them "just" in
1150-521: A multi-media approach to aggregate intelligence from various platforms or employing factor analysis to filter out biases and noise. While crowds are often leveraged in online applications, they can also be utilized in offline contexts. In some cases, members of a crowd may be offered monetary incentives for participation. Certain applications of "wisdom of the crowd", such as jury duty in the United States, mandate crowd participation. The insight that crowd responses to an estimation task can be modeled as
1265-406: A new theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s. The theory can generally be traced to American legal realism and is considered "the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective". It holds that the law is largely contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of
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#17327802286881380-481: A norm. Joseph Raz's theory of legal positivism argues against the incorporation of moral values to explain law's validity. In Raz's 1979 book The Authority of Law , he criticised what he called the "weak social thesis" to explain law. He formulates the weak social thesis as "(a) Sometimes the identification of some laws turn on moral arguments, but also with, (b) In all legal systems the identification of some law turns on moral argument." Raz argues that law's authority
1495-412: A one-pass classification solution. It gauges the expertise level of individuals by assessing the relative "distance" between them. Specifically, the algorithm identifies experts by presuming that their responses will be relatively "closer" to each other when addressing questions within their field of expertise. This approach enhances the algorithm's ability to discern expertise levels in scenarios where only
1610-428: A pivotal book on Hart (second edition published in 2008), which further refined and offered some important criticisms that led MacCormick to develop his own theory (the best example of which is his Institutions of Law , 2007). Other important critiques include those of Ronald Dworkin , John Finnis, and Joseph Raz . In recent years, debates on the nature of law have become increasingly fine-grained. One important debate
1725-527: A random other participant), it did render better estimates than simply asking individuals to make two estimates. Hirt and Markman (1995) found that participants need not be limited to a consider-the-opposite strategy in order to improve judgments. Researchers asked participants to consider-an-alternative – operationalized as any plausible alternative (rather than simply focusing on the "opposite" alternative) – finding that simply considering an alternative improved judgments. Not all studies have shown support for
1840-410: A sample from a probability distribution invites comparisons with individual cognition. In particular, it is possible that individual cognition is probabilistic in the sense that individual estimates are drawn from an "internal probability distribution." If this is the case, then two or more estimates of the same quantity from the same person should average to a value closer to ground truth than either of
1955-473: A series of date estimations regarding historical events (e.g., when electricity was discovered), without knowledge that they would be asked to provide a second estimate. Next, half of the participants were simply asked to make a second estimate. The other half were asked to use a consider-the-opposite strategy to make dialectical estimates (using their initial estimates as a reference point). Specifically, participants were asked to imagine that their initial estimate
2070-499: A small subset of participants possess proficiency in a given domain, mitigating the impact of potential biases that may arise during anonymous online interactions. The wisdom of the crowd effect is easily undermined. Social influence can cause the average of the crowd answers to be inaccurate, while the geometric mean and the median are more robust. This relies on knowing an individual's uncertainty and trust of their estimate. The average answer of individuals who are knowledgeable about
2185-528: A so-called "mental distribution" from which individuals draw their estimates; in fact, they found that in some cases asking oneself multiple times actually reduces accuracy. Ultimately, they argue that the results of Vul and Pashler (2008) overestimate the wisdom of the "crowd within" – as their results show that asking oneself more than three times actually reduces accuracy to levels below that reported by Vul and Pashler (who only asked participants to make two estimates). Müller-Trede (2011) attempted to investigate
2300-534: A social institution that relates to the larger political and social context in which it exists. Jurisprudence can be divided into categories both by the type of question scholars seek to answer and by the theories of jurisprudence, or schools of thought, regarding how those questions are best answered: The terms "philosophy of law" and "jurisprudence" are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology . Whereas lawyers are interested in what
2415-581: A sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience". H. L. A. Hart criticized Austin and Bentham's early legal positivism because the command theory failed to account for individual's compliance with the law. Hans Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century and has been highly influential in Europe and Latin America, although less so in common law countries. His Pure Theory of Law describes law as "binding norms", while at
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#17327802286882530-454: A statistically optimized system for decision making. Experiments and computational models in multisensory integration have shown that sensory input from different senses is integrated in a statistically optimal way, in addition, it appears that the kind of inferences used to infer single sources for multiple sensory inputs uses a Bayesian inference about the causal origin of the sensory stimuli. As such, it appears neurobiologically plausible that
2645-422: A system of law, or to give it our respect. Thus, the law must have a morality that goes beyond the societal rules under which laws are made. Sophisticated positivist and natural law theories sometimes resemble each other and may have certain points in common. Identifying a particular theorist as a positivist or a natural law theorist sometimes involves matters of emphasis and degree, and the particular influences on
2760-532: A theory of ius gentium (law of nations), and thus is an important figure in the transition to modernity. He extrapolated his ideas of legitimate sovereign power to international affairs, concluding that such affairs ought to be determined by forms respecting of the rights of all and that the common good of the world should take precedence before the good of any single state. This meant that relations between states ought to pass from being justified by force to being justified by law and justice. Some scholars have upset
2875-509: A topic will vary from the average of individuals who know nothing of the topic. A simple average of knowledgeable and inexperienced opinions will be less accurate than one in which the weighting of the average is based on the uncertainty and trust of their answer. Experiments run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology found that when a group of people were asked to answer a question together they would attempt to come to
2990-417: Is the case. So analysing and clarifying the way the world is must be treated as a strictly separate question from normative and evaluative questions of what ought to be done. The most important questions of analytic jurisprudence are: "What are laws?"; "What is the law?"; "What is the relationship between law and power/sociology?"; and "What is the relationship between law and morality?" Legal positivism
3105-408: Is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics. When there is not a precise answer crowds can come to arbitrary conclusions. Wisdom-of-the-crowd algorithms thrive when individual responses exhibit proximity and a symmetrical distribution around the correct, albeit unknown, answer. This symmetry allows errors in responses to cancel each other out during
3220-411: Is a necessary truth that there are vices that a legal system cannot possibly have (for example, it cannot commit rape or murder). Legal realism is the view that a theory of law should be descriptive and account for the reasons why judges decide cases as they do. Legal realism had some affinities with the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. The essential tenet of legal realism is that all law
3335-485: Is a time delay between subsequent judgments. Even with considerable delay between estimates, between-person aggregation is more beneficial. The average of a large number of judgements from the same person is barely better than the average of two judgements from different people. Herzog and Hertwig (2009) attempted to improve on the "wisdom of many in one mind" (i.e., the "crowd within") by asking participants to use dialectical bootstrapping. Dialectical bootstrapping involves
3450-416: Is based on "first principles": ... this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this ... The desires to live and to procreate are counted by Aquinas among those basic (natural) human values on which all other human values are based. Francisco de Vitoria was perhaps the first to develop
3565-496: Is commonly said that Hobbes's views on human nature were influenced by his times. The English Civil War and the Cromwellian dictatorship had taken place; and, in reacting to that, Hobbes felt that absolute authority vested in a monarch, whose subjects obeyed the law, was the basis of a civilized society. John Austin and Jeremy Bentham were early legal positivists who sought to provide a descriptive account of law that describes
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3680-425: Is conceptually distinct from morality. While law might contain morality, the separability thesis states that "it is in no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality, though in fact they have often done so." Legal positivists disagree about the extent of the separability thesis. Exclusive legal positivists, notably Joseph Raz , go further than the standard thesis and deny that it
3795-485: Is from this cultural movement that Justinian 's Corpus Juris Civilis was born. Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was based on the first principles of natural law , civil law , and the law of nations . Natural law holds that there are rational objective limits to the power of rulers, the foundations of law are accessible through reason, and it is from these laws of nature that human laws gain force. The moral theory of natural law asserts that law
3910-528: Is identifiable purely through social sources, without reference to moral reasoning. This view he calls "the sources thesis". Raz suggests that any categorisation of rules beyond their role as authority is better left to sociology than to jurisprudence. Some philosophers used to contend that positivism was the theory that held that there was "no necessary connection" between law and morality; but influential contemporary positivists—including Joseph Raz, John Gardner , and Leslie Green —reject that view. Raz claims it
4025-446: Is inherent in nature and constitutive of morality, at least in part, and that an objective moral order, external to human legal systems, underlies natural law. On this view, while legislators can enact and even successfully enforce immoral laws, such laws are legally invalid. The view is captured by the maxim: " an unjust law is no law at all ", where 'unjust' means 'contrary to the natural law.' Natural law theory has medieval origins in
4140-424: Is made by humans and thus should account for reasons besides legal rules that led to a legal decision. There are two separate schools of legal realism: American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism. American legal realism grew out of the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes . At the start of Holmes's The Common Law , he claims that "[t]he life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". This view
4255-554: Is possible for morality to be a part of law at all. The discretion thesis states that judges create new law when they are given discretion to adjudicate cases where existing law underdetermines the result. Hobbes was a social contractarian and believed that the law had peoples' tacit consent. He believed that society was formed from a state of nature to protect people from the state of war that would exist otherwise. In Leviathan , Hobbes argues that without an ordered society life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." It
4370-436: Is small. Miller and Stevyers reduced the independence of individual responses in a wisdom-of-the-crowds experiment by allowing limited communication between participants. Participants were asked to answer ordering questions for general knowledge questions such as the order of U.S. presidents. For half of the questions, each participant started with the ordering submitted by another participant (and alerted to this fact), and for
4485-421: Is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise. Trial by jury can be understood as at least partly relying on wisdom of the crowd, compared to bench trial which relies on one or a few experts. In politics, sometimes sortition is held as an example of what wisdom of
4600-472: Is the dominant theory, although there is a growing number of critics who offer their own interpretations. Historical jurisprudence came to prominence during the debate on the proposed codification of German law . In his book On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence , Friedrich Carl von Savigny argued that Germany did not have a legal language that would support codification because
4715-608: Is the speed of sound, in kilometers per hour?) did not improve with repeated judgments, while averaging individual judgments with those of a random other did improve accuracy. This, Müller-Trede argues, is the result of the bounds implied by year and percentage questions. Van Dolder and Van den Assem (2018) studied the "crowd within" using a large database from three estimation competitions organised by Holland Casino. For each of these competitions, they find that within-person aggregation indeed improves accuracy of estimates. Furthermore, they also confirm that this method works better if there
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4830-420: Is within legal positivism. One school is sometimes called "exclusive legal positivism" and is associated with the view that the legal validity of a norm can never depend on its moral correctness. A second school is labeled "inclusive legal positivism", a major proponent of which is Wil Waluchow, and is associated with the view that moral considerations may , but do not necessarily, determine the legal validity of
4945-530: The Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics ). Aquinas's influence was such as to affect a number of early translations of these passages, though more recent translations render them more literally. Aristotle's theory of justice is bound up in his idea of the golden mean . Indeed, his treatment of what he calls "political justice" derives from his discussion of "the just" as
5060-552: The Daoists , Confucians , and Legalists all had competing theories of jurisprudence. Jurisprudence in ancient Rome had its origins with the periti —experts in the jus mos maiorum (traditional law), a body of oral laws and customs. Praetors established a working body of laws by judging whether or not singular cases were capable of being prosecuted either by the edicta , the annual pronunciation of prosecutable offences, or in extraordinary situations, additions made to
5175-424: The edicta . A iudex (originally a magistrate , later a private individual appointed to judge a specific case ) would then prescribe a remedy according to the facts of the case. The sentences of the iudex were supposed to be simple interpretations of the traditional customs, but—apart from considering what traditional customs applied in each case—soon developed a more equitable interpretation, coherently adapting
5290-419: The global warming controversy context – in spite of identical evidence presented, the pre-existing beliefs (or evidence presented first) has an overwhelming effect on the beliefs formed. In addition, the preferences of the agent (the particular rewards that they value) also cause the beliefs formed to change – this explains the biased assimilation (also known as confirmation bias ) shown above. This model allows
5405-444: The golden shiner is a fish that prefers shady areas. The single shiner has a very difficult time finding shady regions in a body of water whereas a large group is much more efficient at finding the shade. Although classic wisdom-of-the-crowds findings center on point estimates of single continuous quantities, the phenomenon also scales up to higher-dimensional problems that do not lend themselves to aggregation methods such as taking
5520-450: The "crowd within" improving judgments. Ariely and colleagues asked participants to provide responses based on their answers to true-false items and their confidence in those answers. They found that while averaging judgment estimates between individuals significantly improved estimates, averaging repeated judgment estimates made by the same individuals did not significantly improve estimates. Wisdom-of-the-crowds research routinely attributes
5635-529: The American legal realists of the early twentieth century, legal realism sought to describe the way judges decide cases. For legal realists such as Jerome Frank , judges start with the facts before them and then move to legal principles. Before legal realism, theories of jurisprudence turned this method around where judges were thought to begin with legal principles and then look to facts. It has become common today to identify Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as
5750-459: The Dean of Harvard Law School , used this term to characterise his legal philosophy . In the United States, many later writers followed Pound's lead or developed distinctive approaches to sociological jurisprudence. In Australia, Julius Stone strongly defended and developed Pound's ideas. In the 1930s, a significant split between the sociological jurists and the American legal realists emerged. In
5865-441: The aggregation of opinions and knowledge on a massive scale, creating what some have defined as "intelligent communities." However, the effectiveness of these digital crowds can be compromised by issues such as demographic biases, the influence of highly active users, and the presence of bots, which can skew the diversity and independence necessary for a crowd to be truly wise. To mitigate these issues, researchers have suggested using
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#17327802286885980-409: The answer given by any of the individuals within the group. Jury theorems from social choice theory provide formal arguments for wisdom of the crowd given a variety of more or less plausible assumptions. Both the assumptions and the conclusions remain controversial, even though the theorems themselves are not. The oldest and simplest is Condorcet's jury theorem (1785). Aristotle is credited as
6095-442: The answers with the highest average. In the context of wisdom of the crowd, the term crowd takes on a broad meaning. One definition characterizes a crowd as a group of people amassed by an open call for participation. In the digital age, the potential for collective intelligence has expanded with the advent of information technologies and social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others. These platforms enable
6210-444: The averaging process. Conversely, these algorithms may falter when the subset of correct answers is limited, failing to counteract random biases. This challenge is particularly pronounced in online settings where individuals, often with varying levels of expertise, respond anonymously. Some "wisdom-of-the-crowd" algorithms tackle this issue using expectation–maximization voting techniques. The Wisdom-IN-the-crowd (WICRO) algorithm offers
6325-411: The basis of being analogous to the laws of physical science. Natural law is often contrasted to positive law which asserts law as the product of human activity and human volition. Another approach to natural-law jurisprudence generally asserts that human law must be in response to compelling reasons for action. There are two readings of the natural-law jurisprudential stance. Aristotle is often said to be
6440-405: The best answer based on all the knowledge a person has. These results were mostly confirmed in a high-powered pre-registered replication. The only result that was not fully replicated was that a delay in the second guess generates a better estimate. Hourihan and Benjamin (2010) tested the hypothesis that the estimate improvements observed by Vul and Pashler in the delayed responding condition were
6555-480: The brain implements decision-making procedures that are close to optimal for Bayesian inference. Brocas and Carrillo propose a model to make decisions based on noisy sensory inputs, beliefs about the state of the world are modified by Bayesian updating, and then decisions are made based on beliefs passing a threshold. They show that this model, when optimized for single-step decision making, produces belief anchoring and polarization of opinions – exactly as described in
6670-468: The content of legal concepts using the methods of social science , analytical jurisprudence seeks to provide a general account of the nature of law through the tools of conceptual analysis . The account is general in the sense of targeting universal features of law that hold at all times and places. Analytic, or clarificatory , jurisprudence takes a neutral point of view and uses descriptive language when referring to various aspects of legal systems. This
6785-452: The controversy has not arisen yet, or moot , meaning that the controversy has already been Benford's law of controversy , as expressed by the astrophysicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford in 1980, states: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. In other words, it claims that the less factual information is available on a topic, the more controversy can arise around that topic – and
6900-465: The crowd would look like. Decision-making would happen by a diverse group instead of by a fairly homogenous political group or party. Research within cognitive science has sought to model the relationship between wisdom of the crowd effects and individual cognition. A large group's aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, but often superior to,
7015-465: The definition of law; legal validity; legal norms and values; as well as the relationship between law and other fields of study, including economics , ethics , history , sociology , and political philosophy . Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was based on the first principles of natural law , civil law , and the law of nations . Contemporary philosophy of law addresses problems internal to law and legal systems and problems of law as
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#17327802286887130-554: The difference between civil and criminal law. In addition to analytic jurisprudence, legal philosophy is also concerned with normative theories of law. "Normative jurisprudence involves normative, evaluative, and otherwise prescriptive questions about the law." The English word is derived from the Latin, iurisprudentia . Iuris is the genitive form of ius meaning law, and prudentia meaning prudence (also: discretion, foresight, forethought, circumspection). It refers to
7245-538: The diverse kinds of developing transnational law) and the increasingly important interrelations of law and culture, especially in multicultural Western societies. Legal positivism is the view that the content of law is dependent on social facts and that a legal system's existence is not constrained by morality. Within legal positivism, theorists agree that law's content is a product of social facts, but theorists disagree whether law's validity can be explained by incorporating moral values. Legal positivists who argue against
7360-575: The early Roman Empire to the 3rd century, a relevant body of literature was produced by groups of scholars, including the Proculians and Sabinians . The scientific nature of the studies was unprecedented in ancient times. After the 3rd century, juris prudentia became a more bureaucratic activity, with few notable authors. It was during the Eastern Roman Empire (5th century) that legal studies were once again undertaken in depth, and it
7475-501: The empirical methods used by social scientists. Prominent Scandinavian legal realists are Alf Ross , Axel Hägerström , and Karl Olivecrona . Scandinavian legal realists also took a naturalist approach to law. Despite its decline in popularity, legal realism continues to influence a wide spectrum of jurisprudential schools today, including critical legal studies , feminist legal theory , critical race theory , sociology of law , and law and economics . Critical legal studies are
7590-722: The exercise of good judgment, common sense, and caution, especially in the conduct of practical matters. The word first appeared in written English in 1628, at a time when the word prudence meant knowledge of, or skill in, a matter. It may have entered English via the French jurisprudence , which appeared earlier. The terms "philosophy of law" and "jurisprudence" are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology . Ancient jurisprudence begins with various Dharmaśāstra texts of India. Dharmasutras of Āpastaṃba and Baudhāyana are examples. In Ancient China,
7705-476: The extent to which they are binding. Kelsen contends that the extent to which legal norms are binding, their specifically "legal" character, can be understood without tracing it ultimately to some suprahuman source such as God, personified Nature or—of great importance in his time—a personified State or Nation. In the English-speaking world, the most influential legal positivist of the twentieth century
7820-488: The father of natural law. Like his philosophical forefathers Socrates and Plato, Aristotle posited the existence of natural justice or natural right ( dikaion physikon , δικαίον φυσικόν , Latin ius naturale ). His association with natural law is largely due to how he was interpreted by Thomas Aquinas . This was based on Aquinas' conflation of natural law and natural right, the latter of which Aristotle posits in Book V of
7935-734: The father of the Thomistic school of philosophy, for a long time the primary philosophical approach of the Roman Catholic Church . The work for which he is best known is the Summa Theologiae . One of the thirty-five Doctors of the Church , he is considered by many Catholics to be the Church's greatest theologian. Consequently, many institutions of learning have been named after him. Aquinas distinguished four kinds of law: eternal, natural, divine, and human: Natural law
8050-429: The field has traditionally focused on giving an account of law's nature, some scholars have begun to examine the nature of domains within law, e.g. tort law, contract law, or criminal law. These scholars focus on what makes certain domains of law distinctive and how one domain differs from another. A particularly fecund area of research has been the distinction between tort law and criminal law, which more generally bears on
8165-426: The first estimate would also have a different error (both systematic and random ) than the first estimate – increasing the accuracy of the average judgment. From an analytical perspective dialectical bootstrapping should increase accuracy so long as the dialectical estimate is not too far off and the errors of the first and dialectical estimates are different. To test this, Herzog and Hertwig asked participants to make
8280-447: The first person to write about the "wisdom of the crowd" in his work Politics . According to Aristotle, "it is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man's cost". The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of
8395-553: The governed to obey. Secondary rules are rules that confer authority to create new primary rules or modify existing ones. Secondary rules are divided into rules of adjudication (how to resolve legal disputes), rules of change (how laws are amended), and the rule of recognition (how laws are identified as valid). The validity of a legal system comes from the "rule of recognition", which is a customary practice of officials (especially barristers and judges) who identify certain acts and decisions as sources of law. In 1981, Neil MacCormick wrote
8510-532: The incorporation of moral values to explain law's validity are labeled exclusive (or hard) legal positivists. Joseph Raz's legal positivism is an example of exclusive legal positivism. Legal positivists who argue that law's validity can be explained by incorporating moral values are labeled inclusive (or soft) legal positivists. The legal positivist theories of H. L. A. Hart and Jules Coleman are examples of inclusive legal positivism. Legal positivism has traditionally been associated with three doctrines:
8625-419: The individual judgments, since the effect of statistical noise within each of these judgments is reduced. This of course rests on the assumption that the noise associated with each judgment is (at least somewhat) statistically independent . Thus, the crowd needs to be independent but also diversified, in order to allow a variety of answers. The answers on the ends of the spectrum will cancel each other, allowing
8740-524: The law as it is. Austin explained the descriptive focus for legal positivism by saying, "The existence of law is one thing; its merit and demerit another. Whether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether it be or be not conformable to an assumed standard, is a different enquiry." For Austin and Bentham, a society is governed by a sovereign who has de facto authority. Through the sovereign's authority come laws, which for Austin and Bentham are commands backed by sanctions for non-compliance. Along with Hume, Bentham
8855-446: The law is on a specific issue in a specific jurisdiction, analytical philosophers of law are interested in identifying the features of law shared across cultures, times, and places. Taken together, these foundational features of law offer the kind of universal definition philosophers are after. The general approach allows philosophers to ask questions about, for example, what separates law from morality, politics, or practical reason. While
8970-473: The law to newer social exigencies. The law was then adjusted with evolving institutiones (legal concepts), while remaining in the traditional mode. Praetors were replaced in the 3rd century BC by a laical body of prudentes . Admission to this body was conditional upon proof of competence or experience. Under the Roman Empire , schools of law were created, and practice of the law became more academic. From
9085-519: The main precursor of American Legal Realism (other influences include Roscoe Pound , Karl Llewellyn , and Justice Benjamin Cardozo ). Karl Llewellyn, another founder of the U.S. legal realism movement, similarly believed that the law is little more than putty in the hands of judges who are able to shape the outcome of cases based on their personal values or policy choices. The Scandinavian school of legal realism argued that law can be explained through
9200-458: The mean. More complex models have been developed for these purposes. A few examples of higher-dimensional problems that exhibit wisdom-of-the-crowds effects include: In further exploring the ways to improve the results, a new technique called the " surprisingly popular " was developed by scientists at MIT's Sloan Neuroeconomics Lab in collaboration with Princeton University. For a given question, people are asked to give two responses: What they think
9315-403: The mistaken belief of the community's unhindered access to ground truth. Such confidence in the group to find the ground truth is explicable through the success of wisdom of the crowd based inferences. However, if there is no access to the ground truth, as there was not in this model, the method will fail. Bayesian decision theory allows these failures of rationality to be described as part of
9430-500: The morality enacted as law, not the laws themselves. The best evidence of Aristotle's having thought there was a natural law comes from the Rhetoric , where Aristotle notes that, aside from the "particular" laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a "common" law that is according to nature. The context of this remark, however, suggests only that Aristotle thought that it could be rhetorically advantageous to appeal to such
9545-415: The more facts are available, the less controversy can arise. Thus, for example, controversies in physics would be limited to subject areas where experiments cannot be carried out yet, whereas controversies would be inherent to politics, where communities must frequently decide on courses of action based on insufficient information. Controversies are frequently thought to be a result of a lack of confidence on
9660-408: The opinions of the entire crowd in the same way. For instance, a wisdom-of-the-crowd technique would not be expected to compensate for cognitive biases . Scott E. Page introduced the diversity prediction theorem: "The squared error of the collective prediction equals the average squared error minus the predictive diversity". Therefore, when the diversity in a group is large, the error of the crowd
9775-548: The other half, they started with a random ordering, and in both cases were asked to rearrange them (if necessary) to the correct order. Answers where participants started with another participant's ranking were on average more accurate than those from the random starting condition. Miller and Steyvers conclude that different item-level knowledge among participants is responsible for this phenomenon, and that participants integrated and augmented previous participants' knowledge with their own knowledge. Crowds tend to work best when there
9890-477: The outside temperature is higher, if they have been primed to think about heat, and if they are primed with higher temperatures when thinking about the future temperature increases from climate change. In other controversies – such as that around the HPV vaccine , the same evidence seemed to license inference to radically different conclusions. Kahan et al. explained this by the cognitive biases of biased assimilation and
10005-540: The part of the disputants – as implied by Benford's law of controversy , which only talks about lack of information ("passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available"). For example, in analyses of the political controversy over anthropogenic climate change , which is exceptionally virulent in the United States , it has been proposed that those who are opposed to the scientific consensus do so because they don't have enough information about
10120-465: The pedigree thesis, the separability thesis, and the discretion thesis. The pedigree thesis says that the right way to determine whether a directive is law is to look at the directive's source. The thesis claims that it is the fact that the directive was issued by the proper official within a legitimate government, for example, that determines the directive's legal validity—not the directive's moral or practical merits. The separability thesis states that law
10235-427: The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas , especially in his Treatise on law . In late 20th century, John Finnis revived interest in the theory and provided a modern reworking of it. For one, Finnis has argued that the maxim "an unjust law is no law at all" is a poor guide to the classical Thomist position. In its general sense, natural law theory may be compared to both state-of-nature law and general law understood on
10350-427: The post-1870 period. Francisco Suárez , regarded as among the greatest scholastics after Aquinas, subdivided the concept of ius gentium . Working with already well-formed categories, he carefully distinguished ius inter gentes from ius intra gentes . Ius inter gentes (which corresponds to modern international law) was something common to the majority of countries, although, being positive law, not natural law, it
10465-428: The production of controversy to be seen as a consequence of a decision maker optimized for single-step decision making, rather than a result of limited reasoning in the bounded rationality of Daniel Kahneman . Jurisprudence Jurisprudence , also known as theory of law or philosophy of law , is the examination in a general perspective of what law is and what it ought to be. It investigates issues such as
10580-406: The researchers to determine, firstly, the number of times one needs to ask oneself in order to match the accuracy of asking others and then, the rate at which estimates made by oneself improve estimates compared to asking others. The authors concluded that asking oneself an infinite number of times does not surpass the accuracy of asking just one other individual. Overall, they found little support for
10695-629: The result of increased independence of the estimates. To do this Hourihan and Benjamin capitalized on variations in memory span among their participants. In support they found that averaging repeated estimates of those with lower memory spans showed greater estimate improvements than the averaging the repeated estimates of those with larger memory spans. Rauhut and Lorenz (2011) expanded on this research by again asking participants to make estimates of continuous quantities related to real world knowledge. In this case participants were informed that they would make five consecutive estimates. This approach allowed
10810-476: The right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The averaged difference between the two indicates the correct answer. It was found that the "surprisingly popular" algorithm reduces errors by 21.3 percent in comparison to simple majority votes, and by 24.2 percent in comparison to basic confidence-weighted votes where people express how confident they are of their answers and 22.2 percent compared to advanced confidence-weighted votes, where one only uses
10925-461: The same time refusing to evaluate those norms. That is, "legal science" is to be separated from "legal politics". Central to the Pure Theory of Law is the notion of a ' basic norm ' ( Grundnorm )—a hypothetical norm, presupposed by the jurist, from which all "lower" norms in the hierarchy of a legal system , beginning with constitutional law , are understood to derive their authority or
11040-507: The second half of the twentieth century, sociological jurisprudence as a distinct movement declined as jurisprudence came more strongly under the influence of analytical legal philosophy; but with increasing criticism of dominant orientations of legal philosophy in English-speaking countries in the present century, it has attracted renewed interest. Increasingly, its contemporary focus is on providing theoretical resources for jurists to aid their understanding of new types of regulation (for example,
11155-401: The sense of "general justice"; as such, this idea of justice is more or less coextensive with virtue. "Particular" or "partial justice", by contrast, is the part of "general justice" or the individual virtue that is concerned with treating others equitably. Aristotle moves from this unqualified discussion of justice to a qualified view of political justice, by which he means something close to
11270-444: The standard account of the origins of International law, which emphasises the seminal text De iure belli ac pacis by Hugo Grotius , and argued for Vitoria and, later, Suárez's importance as forerunners and, potentially, founders of the field. Others, such as Koskenniemi, have argued that none of these humanist and scholastic thinkers can be understood to have founded international law in the modern sense, instead placing its origins in
11385-411: The subject of modern jurisprudence. Of political justice, Aristotle argues that it is partly derived from nature and partly a matter of convention. This can be taken as a statement that is similar to the views of modern natural law theorists. But it must also be remembered that Aristotle is describing a view of morality, not a system of law, and therefore his remarks as to nature are about the grounding of
11500-426: The superiority of crowd averages over individual judgments to the elimination of individual noise, an explanation that assumes independence of the individual judgments from each other. Thus the crowd tends to make its best decisions if it is made up of diverse opinions and ideologies. Averaging can eliminate random errors that affect each person's answer in a different way, but not systematic errors that affect
11615-471: The theorist's work. The natural law theorists of the distant past, such as Aquinas and John Locke made no distinction between analytic and normative jurisprudence, while modern natural law theorists, such as John Finnis, who claim to be positivists, still argue that law is moral by nature. In his book Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980, 2011), John Finnis provides a restatement of natural law doctrine. Unlike experimental jurisprudence , which investigates
11730-477: The three-week delay condition were more accurate than guesses made in immediate succession. One explanation of this effect is that guesses in the immediate condition were less independent of each other (an anchoring effect) and were thus subject to (some of) the same kind of noise. In general, these results suggest that individual cognition may indeed be subject to an internal probability distribution characterized by stochastic noise, rather than consistently producing
11845-404: The topic. A study of 1540 US adults found instead that levels of scientific literacy correlated with the strength of opinion on climate change , but not on which side of the debate that they stood. The puzzling phenomenon of two individuals being able to reach different conclusions after being exposed to the same facts has been frequently explained (particularly by Daniel Kahneman) by reference to
11960-504: The traditions, customs, and beliefs of the German people did not include a belief in a code. Historicists believe that law originates with society. An effort to systematically inform jurisprudence from sociological insights developed from the beginning of the twentieth century, as sociology began to establish itself as a distinct social science , especially in the United States and in continental Europe . In Germany, Austria and France ,
12075-478: The types of questions in which utilizing the "crowd within" is most effective. He found that while accuracy gains were smaller than would be expected from averaging ones' estimates with another individual, repeated judgments lead to increases in accuracy for both year estimation questions (e.g., when was the thermometer invented?) and questions about estimated percentages (e.g., what percentage of internet users connect from China?). General numerical questions (e.g., what
12190-501: The use of dialectic (reasoned discussion that takes place between two or more parties with opposing views, in an attempt to determine the best answer) and bootstrapping (advancing oneself without the assistance of external forces). They posited that people should be able to make greater improvements on their original estimates by basing the second estimate on antithetical information. Therefore, these second estimates, based on different assumptions and knowledge than that used to generate
12305-458: The wisdom of the crowd phenomena to take its place. Another caveat is that individual probability judgments are often biased toward extreme values (e.g., 0 or 1). Thus any beneficial effect of multiple judgments from the same person is likely to be limited to samples from an unbiased distribution. Vul and Pashler (2008) asked participants for point estimates of continuous quantities associated with general world knowledge, such as "What percentage of
12420-410: The work of the "free law" theorists (e.g. Ernst Fuchs, Hermann Kantorowicz , Eugen Ehrlich and François Gény ) encouraged the use of sociological insights in the development of legal and juristic theory. The most internationally influential advocacy for a "sociological jurisprudence" occurred in the United States, where, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Roscoe Pound , for many years
12535-410: The world's airports are in the United States?" Without being alerted to the procedure in advance, half of the participants were immediately asked to make a second, different guess in response to the same question, and the other half were asked to do this three weeks later. The average of a participant's two guesses was more accurate than either individual guess. Furthermore, the averages of guesses made in
12650-515: Was H. L. A. Hart , professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University . Hart argued that the law should be understood as a system of social rules. In The Concept of Law , Hart rejected Kelsen's views that sanctions were essential to law and that a normative social phenomenon, like law, cannot be grounded in non-normative social facts. Hart claimed that law is the union of primary rules and secondary rules. Primary rules require individuals to act or not act in certain ways and create duties for
12765-416: Was a philosophical development that rejected natural law's fusing of what law is and what it ought to be. David Hume argued, in A Treatise of Human Nature , that people invariably slip from describing what the world is to asserting that we therefore ought to follow a particular course of action. But as a matter of pure logic, one cannot conclude that we ought to do something merely because something
12880-539: Was a reaction to legal formalism that was popular the time due to the Christopher Columbus Langdell . Holmes's writings on jurisprudence also laid the foundations for the predictive theory of law. In his article "The Path of the Law", Holmes argues that "the object of [legal] study...is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts." For
12995-423: Was an early and staunch supporter of the utilitarian concept, and was an avid prison reformer, advocate for democracy , and firm atheist . Bentham's views about law and jurisprudence were popularized by his student John Austin . Austin was the first chair of law at the new University of London , from 1829. Austin's utilitarian answer to "what is law?" was that law is "commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from
13110-487: Was not necessarily universal. On the other hand, ius intra gentes , or civil law, is specific to each nation. Writing after World War II , Lon L. Fuller defended a secular and procedural form of natural law. He emphasised that the (natural) law must meet certain formal requirements (such as being impartial and publicly knowable). To the extent that an institutional system of social control falls short of these requirements, Fuller argued, we are less inclined to recognise it as
13225-422: Was off, consider what information may have been wrong, what this alternative information would suggest, if that would have made their estimate an overestimate or an underestimate, and finally, based on this perspective what their new estimate would be. Results of this study revealed that while dialectical bootstrapping did not outperform the wisdom of the crowd (averaging each participants' first estimate with that of
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