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NUNES--Marcelo-G.--PEREIRA--Guilherme-S.J.-Jurimetrics--Improving-the-Quality-of-Laws-Through-Empirical-Studies..md

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+January 13, 2013, 7:35 am
+
+DIAGNOSIS AND SOLUTION
+
+The act of legislating involves a large expenditure of economic and human resources
+by legislative houses, the academic community and civil society. Once enacted, the
+
+new law still requires an additional effort from the Judiciary and law enforcers, in
+its interpretation and application. In order not to be wasted, these efforts must be
+based on investigations of the concrete and current legal reality, in order to guarantee
+
+that new legal regimes meet the desires of the population and the real conflicts
+that are daily referred to our courts.
+
+By Marcelo G. Nunes and Guilherme SJ Pereira
+
+Using jurimetrics can improve the quality of laws
+
+No matter how careful one is when drafting a law, it will always contain a space of
+freedom that must be filled in at the time of its fulfillment. Empirical studies of
+law, therefore, assume a role of great relevance, as they allow us to know how
+
+citizens and judges behave in the face of an existing law and how they are likely to
+behave in the face of a new law. This type of investigation is an important tool that
+allows calculating how a law is likely to be received and whether it will be complied with
+
+— or not — by society.
+
+One of the economic and quick means to investigate this reality is jurimetry, a discipline
+
+that studies the functioning of the legal order through statistics, describing the
+characteristics of the law in operation and inferring associations capable of
+explaining the behavior and reactions of this order. Making use of sampling
+
+and inferential studies, this technique is capable of investigating large populations and
+identifying association and causality relationships that elucidate the reasons for the
+successes and failures of our current practices. The concrete plane of law
+needs to be studied because court decisions, contracts and all acts created daily by
+
+the thousands in the Brazilian legal order are not a mechanical consequence of the
+law, but constitute the result of a complex and rich process of coordination of factors legal, social, economic and
+
+Machine Translated by Google
+Brazil is going through a moment of profound economic and social transformation, a fact
+
+recognizable through the numerous bills and codifying reforms pending in the National Congress.
+
+At this historical moment, it is essential that we pay attention to the importance of empirical
+
+studies. Legislating without statistical data is legislating in the dark.
+
+There is yet another aspect that demonstrates the importance of empirical studies in legislation.
+
+They are also important so that we know where there is hyper-regulation and
+
+where there is hypo-regulation, that is, in which fields there is already excessive regulatory
+
+intervention by the State and where, on the other hand, there is a lack of such intervention.
+
+Such studies make it possible to know where legislative reform is and where it is not, as well
+
+as, having concluded that there is a need for reform, what and how it should be changed.
+
+Abstract academic studies are necessary, but equally essential is the study of reality and
+
+reasoning with a logic focused on practice. All this will help us to outline legislative policies with a
+
+greater probability of success.
+
+Jurimetric surveys are a privileged access channel to the concrete level of law, capable of describing
+
+these large populations of conflicts (the Brazilian Judiciary Power faced an unbelievable mass
+
+of 90 million cases in 2011), informing legislators and jurists about the shortcomings of the
+
+legal regimes currently in force and, thus, provide a clearer image of the improvements they entail.
+
+The dissemination of jurimetric research will help the legal community both in the
+
+preparation of diagnoses and in the development of solutions. Jurimetrics is able to provide
+
+support in legislative debates and, mainly, to (i) identify the foci of hyper- and hypo-regulation;
+
+(ii) overcome idiosyncratic legislative debates, based exclusively on personal experiences and
+
+theoretical concepts of law operators; (iii) diagnose with greater precision the problems that justify
+
+the movement of the legislative machine; (iv) to anticipate with reasonable precision the
+
+effects of new legal regimes; and (v) evaluate the results of transitions between regimes, as
+
+well as the fulfillment of goals pre-established by the Legislature. As a result, we will
+
+have a legal order that is more in line with reality, more functional, more effective, faster, more
+
+economical and, therefore, fairer.
+
+No doctor or laboratory puts a drug on the market without first submitting
+
+its active ingredient undergoes rigorous control tests. In the same way, the "social medicines",
+
+which are the laws, also need to be submitted to tests capable of anticipating their adequacy to
+
+overcome the disturbances that they propose to correct.
+
+psychological tests, which contain abundant information about the challenges to be faced
+
+by legislators.
+
+Machine Translated by Google
+Marcelo G. Nunes is a lawyer and partner at Guedes Nunes, Oliveira e Roquim
+Sociedade de Advogados.
+
+Guilherme SJ Pereira is a lawyer, partner at Yarshell, Mateucci e Camargo Advogados.
+
+Consultor Jurídico Magazine , January 13, 2013, 7:35 am
+
+Machine Translated by Google