What is it about?
Police officers must daily determine whether they have an adequate legal basis to detain a motorist for a sniff by a trained drug dog. This is a step toward automatic identification of factors courts rely upon in each case to assess suspicion.
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Why is it important?
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that law is a prediction of what a court will do. Some types of legal tests, however, defy this principle. Multi-factored legal tests are inherently unpredictable. Unless a court has previously resolved the same set of facts being considered, it is impossible to know how a court will resolve a case being considered. It is presently impossible to know the weight that courts will assign each factor individually and in combination with other factors. If, however, it were possible to automatically identify the factors courts are relying on to resolve legal disputes in a large number of cases, a predictive model of judicial decision making becomes possible. This is an early step toward automatically identifying the factors courts are relying on when they conclude an officer possessed or lacked reasonable suspicion to detain a car for a sniff by a drug dog.
Perspectives
There are a number of multi-factored and totality-of-the-circumstances tests in the law. This research therefore has the potential to make many areas of law more predictable.
Wes Oliver
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Automatic Identification and Empirical Analysis of Legally Relevant Factors, June 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3594536.3595157.
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