Numeracy and Legal Decisionmaking

Abstract:     
There are now substantial literatures in health and financial decisionmaking chronicling how people’s numerical abilities affect their decisions. This Article presents the first empirical studies of whether numeracy — or people’s ability to understand and use numbers — also interacts with legal decisionmaking. It finds that the substance of legal analysis varies with math skill for at least some subset of cases, suggesting that legal analysis — and legal advice — may vary with the math skills of the decisionmaker. On the margin, this means that similarly situated persons may not get the same outcome when they bring identical cases, simply because the attorney they hire (or the judge they face) has a hidden set of characteristics — i.e., high or low numeracy. This conclusion creates fairness and rule of law concerns about the quality and consistency of legal decisionmaking, and implicates numeracy as a neglected but potentially critical aspect of legal education.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 61

Keywords: numeracy, math skill, legal decisionmaking, law and psychology, decision making, attorney or lawyer error, perception of risk, empirical legal studies

JEL Classification: D81, K00, K10, K13, K32, K1, K2, K3, K4, C00

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