Computer-Aided Law Decisions

The purpose of this article is to describe how microcomputers can aid in making law decisions, including decisions that relate to the judicial process, law practice, and law management

Court-Curbing Periods in American History

Due to its unavoidable involvement in the political process, the Supreme Court has often been an object of congressional attack. Excellent descriptive studies have been made of certain periods of conflict between Congress and the Court,\u27 but there is a lack of writing which systematically analyzes relations between Congress and the Court throughout American history. It is the purpose of this: paper to analyze in a partially quantitative manner some of the factors which seem to account for the occurrence or nonoccurrence and for the success or failure of congressional attempts to curb the Court

Microcomputers, Risk Analysis, and Litigation Strategy

This article covers three important aspects of litigation strategy. The first part is concerned with varieties of sensitivity analysis in civil and criminal cases. Sensitivity analysis refers to how the bottom-line conclusion of going to trial, accepting a settlement, or choosing another alternative is affected by changes in the inputs, which mainly relate to such matters or criteria as (1) the predicted damages, (2) the probability of receiving them, (3) the settlement offered, (4) the litigation costs, and (5) the settlement costs. The second part deals with the use of decision matrices and microcomputers for analyzing litigation-strategy decisions, including sensitivity analysis. A decision matrix involves putting (1) the alternatives to be decided on the rows, (2) the criteria for deciding among them on the columns, and (3) the relations between the alternatives and the criteria in the cells. The third part deals with the leading alternative to the decision-matrix approach to litigation strategy. That leading alternative is the decision-tree approach. A decision tree tends to involve only two alternatives. At least one of them branches into various paths toward various outcomes. Each path may have different probabilities. Each outcome may have a different monetary value