Empirical legal research to test judicial decisions
In making legal judgements, Dutch courts regularly use so-called 'societal views'. For example, within criminal law 'socio-ethical acceptability' is used as a measure of whether sexual contact between minors is a crime or not. Within private law 'what is socially acceptable' is used as a criterion in tort law, and at the intersection of liability law and corporate law, societal views play a role in the question of whether a natural person's conduct can be imputed to the legal entity. However, although judges rely on views in society when making certain judgments, they rarely mention how or where they found those societal views, nor whether and how they investigated what exactly those societal views are. This raises the question of whether...
