ABSTRACT
Scholars of institutions and policy making are typically interested in how political actors implement the law. Scholars of judicial institutions, in particular, are often driven to understand how the law shapes the choices that judges make. Scholars of judicial behavior, as a subset of those, frequently cast their research objectives as efforts to understand the relationship between law and politics. Empirical studies of judicial behavior, in particular, typically set out to evaluate the relationship between legal elements of judicial choice and other factors that are often thought to driven judicial decisions. This chapter proposes a framework for making further progress that proceeds from theoretical first principles and identifies a structure for empirical measurement exercises. It examines a sample of some of the most promising or powerful empirical studies of the law that set out to measure law as an element of judicial behavior. A variety of empirical studies in the literature have adopted each of these approaches to law.
