Law-Engaged Graduate Student [LEGS] Seminar: The Fact-Law Distinction and the Trial Courts

Date & Time Apr 19 2017 12:00 PM - 1:20 PM
Speaker(s)
Sepehr Shahshahani, JD/PhD candidate in Politics
Audience Restricted to Princeton graduate students, faculty, and fellows

Each seminar features law-related papers or practice job talks presented by graduate students from many disciplines.

http://lapa.princeton.edu/content/fact-law-distinction-and-trial-courts

From Sepehr: I explore the implications of an important but understudied procedural rule governing American courts--namely, that appellate courts give more deference to trial courts' findings of fact than to their conclusions of law. After explaining the rule and illustrating its application in a variety of legal contexts, I present a formal model to shed light on its implications for judicial decisionmaking. Formal analysis yields a number of intuitive results--such that the incidence of costly fact-finding increases in the trial court's valuation of dispositional utility and the "factiness" of the issue under consideration, and decreases in the appellate court's valuation of dispositional (relative to rule-based) utility and the trial court's cost of fact-finding. It also yields a number of counterintuitive results--such that the effect of the two courts' preference divergence on the incidence of fact-finding is non-monotonic and that equilibria featuring a strategy by which the higher court always sets the rule at its ideal point are supportable in only limited circumstances. The last result points up an interesting distinction between equilibrium strategy and outcome with respect to rulemaking that would not have been appreciated without a formal model.