Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2020
The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method: multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relate to the debates in academia in the 1980s. By 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.
CRASSH, University of Cambridge. I am indebted to Béatrice Cherrier, Christina Laskaridis, and Steven Medema for their help in the making of this paper. I also thank François Allisson, Federico Brandmayr, Nicolas Chachereau, Jessica Clement, Annie Lou Cot, Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Jean-Baptiste Fleury, David Gindis, Dan Hirschman, Dorian Jullien, Harro Maas, Magdalena Malecka, Alain Marciano, Guillaume Noblet, and John Singleton, as well as the reviewers, for their helpful comments on various versions of the paper. I would like to thank Tiago Mata for access to The Fortune issue, Francine Blau for comments on the Vuyanich trial, and James Gwartney for answering some of my questions by email. All errors remain mine.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.