Current research on data in policy has primarily focused on street-level bureaucrats, neglecting the changes in the work of policy advisors. This research fills this gap by presenting an explorative theoretical understanding of the integration of data, local knowledge and professional expertise in the work of policy advisors. The theoretical perspective we develop builds upon Vickers’s (1995, The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making, Centenary Edition, SAGE) judgments in policymaking. Empirically, we present a case study of a Dutch law enforcement network for preventing and reducing organized crime. Based on interviews, observations, and documents collected in a 13-month ethnographic fieldwork period, we study how policy advisors within this network make their judgments. In contrast with the idea of data as a rationalizing force, our study reveals that how data sources are selected and analyzed for judgments is very much shaped by the existing local and expert knowledge of policy advisors. The weight given to data is highly situational: we found that policy advisors welcome data in scoping the policy issue, but for judgments more closely connected to actual policy interventions, data are given limited value.

Based on an analysis of all administrative court cases published in the Netherlands in 2020 (N = 4,642), we tested the hypothesis that experienced law clerks write judgments with greater confidence than less experienced clerks. A confidently written judgment was defined as being shorter, less standardized, and containing fewer legal references than a less confidently written judgment. In support of this hypothesis, our results showed that law clerks with more experience co-signed judgments that were less standardized and contained fewer legal references. However, contrary to the confidence hypothesis, we established that these judgments were also longer than judgments co-signed by less experienced clerks. Our study contextualizes the concerns expressed in studies on the US Supreme Court about the delegation of drafting duties to inexperienced law clerks. The study challenges the assumption that delegation of drafting duties to law clerks automatically results in judgments with a less confident writing style, due to the clerks’ inexperience. The assumption may hold for the US Supreme Court, where all law clerks are relatively inexperienced. However, the assumption does not hold in jurisdictions in which law clerks can be just as experienced (in terms of years worked in the legal field) as judges. This conclusion suggests that research on the functioning of the US Supreme Court cannot necessarily be generalized to other jurisdictions.

Students may need to decide whether to invest limited resources evenly across all courses and thus end with moderate grades in all, or focus on some of the courses and thus end with variable grades. This study examined which pattern of grades is perceived more favorably. When judging competency, people give more weight to positive than negative information, in which case heterogeneous grades would be perceived more favorably as they have more positive grades than homogeneous moderate grades. Furthermore, high school students are told to demonstrate their passion in college applications. Nonetheless, people generally overweigh negative information, which can result in a preference for a student with homogeneous grades lacking extremely negative grades. The college admissions decisions in particular may also involve emphasis on long-term stable, consistent, and responsible character, which the homogeneous grades may imply. Study 1 found that laypeople, undergraduate students, and admissions officers preferred to admit a student with homogeneous grades to a college than a student with heterogeneous grades even when their GPAs were the same. Study 2 used a heterogeneous transcript signaling a stereotypic STEM or humanities student, and found that while undergraduate students were more split in their choices, laypeople and admissions officers still preferred a student with homogeneous grades. Study 3 further replicated the preference for a student with homogeneous grades by using higher or lower average GPAs and wider or narrower range of grades for the heterogeneous grades. Possible reasons and limitations of the studies are discussed.

Professional judges in traffic courts sentence many hundreds of offenders per year. Using 639 case files from archives, we compared the Matching Heuristic (MH) to compensatory, weighing algorithms (WM). We modeled and cross validated the models on different subsets of the data, and took several other methodological precautions such as allowing each model to select the optimal number of variables and ordering and weighing the variables in accordance to different logics. We did not reproduce the finding by Dhami (2003), who found the MH to be superior to a compensatory algorithm in modeling bail-granting decisions. These simulations brought out the inner logic of the two family of models, showing what combination of parameters works best. It remains remarkable that using only a fraction of the variables and combining them non-compensatorily, MH obtained nearly as good a fit as the weighing method.

We investigated how bilingual speakers process evidentiality information in a dual language activation setting (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) using a translation production and confidence judgment task. Due to interaction of multiple factors in bilingual processing a multifactor model CASP (Complex Adaptive System Principles) for Bilingualism (Filipović & Hawkins, 2019) was used as a theoretical frame. Evidentiality indicates the source of information about past events, i.e., whether they were witnessed firsthand or non-firsthand and it is marked obligatorily in the grammar of Turkish and optionally in English using verbs, adverbs or constructions. The results show that firsthand information is translated more correctly than the non-firsthand in both directions and that different bilingual populations all gravitate towards a shared pattern in both languages but in different ways due to the different proficiency (English vs. Turkish as the stronger (L1) language) and different acquisition histories (early heritage vs. migrant late bilingualism).

Despite strong prohibition against infidelity and endorsement of exclusivity as a norm, many people report engaging in infidelity. The current study examined this paradox by employing a between-subject design using online surveys with 810 adults to assess actor-observer biases in the degree of permissiveness judging own versus partner's hypothetical behaviour, as well as hypocrisy in judgments of infidelity versus self-reported behaviour. Participants judged their own behaviour more permissively than their partner's, but only for emotional/affectionate and technology/online behaviours (not sexual/explicit or solitary behaviours). Many reported having engaged in behaviours that they judged to be infidelity, especially emotional/affectionate and technology/online infidelity behaviours. Sexual attitudes, age, and religion predicted inconsistencies in judgments of infidelity and self-reported behaviour (hypocrisy). This study has implications for educators and practitioners working with couples to improve communication and establish guidelines for appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

This article is written by Paul Magrath who is the Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR). His article explores the issues surrounding the custodianship of those public legal documents, such as court judgments, which form primary sources of law but which may also contain private data, and looks at the way custodians of such data can also act as gatekeepers, enhancing or inhibiting access by the public as well as more specialised users. It expands upon an article published by Infolaw.co.uk entitled “Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information”, and refers to recent case law involving the tension between information in the public domain and the individual's privacy and “right to be forgotten” by search engines. The article also looks at how court documents are made accessible in other jurisdictions and imagines how things might be improved in our own courts, before concluding that the model of a not-for-profit organisation, such as the ICLR or BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute), may work as well if not better than public or private management of judgments and other legal public information.

This article, by Rosemary Hunter, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research’ in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. She begins by describing the uses of judgments as sources within feminist research on judging, and then outlines three different methods of analysis employed within this research: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and the newest method, that of rewriting judgments.