The Blind Lawmaker

Abstract

Many have written about how the Common Law should evolve. The few attempts to demonstrate this empirically, however, have not found evidence that this evolution takes place. This study uses a representation of the Article III United States Federal Courts and an agent-based model to demonstrate that a judicial system may evolve while simultaneously emitting signals to the contrary by evolving via a punctuated equilibrium dynamic. The study then proceeds to demonstrate that agent-based modeling is a viable method for understanding the performance of judicial institutions. After reviewing concepts of jurisprudence and computational social science, the development of the model is discussed followed by a presentation of the results of the aforementioned experiments.