The U.S. Supreme Court: Logic and the Scientific Method

Here are two interesting quotes illustrating the logic of the scientific method as it pertains to the legal field.

From The Fundamentals of Top Management (1951) by Ralph C. Davis, professor of business organizations at Ohio State University:

A science may be any classified body of fundamental facts, principles, and techniques that explains certain basic phenomena, leads to the discovery of general truths and the operation of general laws. It may be “exact,” as in the case of the physical sciences, or “inexact” as in the case of the social sciences. A scientific method, in its simplest terms, may be any method that applies a logic of effective thinking, based on an applicable science, to the solution of a particular set of problems. The “legal method of approach,” as taught in our law schools, is merely a scientific method of approach to the solution of legal problems.

From Law and the Modern Mind (1970) by Jerome Frank:

While lawyers would do well, to be sure, to learn scientific logic from the expositors of scientific method, it is far more important that they catch the spirit of the creative scientist, which yearns not for safety but risk, not for certainty but adventure, which thrives on experimentation, invention and novelty and not on nostalgia for the absolute, which devotes itself to new ways of manipulating protean particulars and not to the quest of undeviating universals.

The experimental approach would be peculiarly serviceable in law. For the practice of law is a series of experiments, of adventures in the adjusting of human relations and the compromising of human conflicts. The paradox is that where this approach is most needed it is all too frequently repudiated. In one sense it is constantly in use, for the daily job of the lawyers would fail without it. But while we lawyers use it, we discount it.