Ira Mark Ellman (Center for the Study of Law and Society, Berkeley Law, University of California, Berkeley; Arizona State University College of Law; Arizona State University (ASU) – Department of Psychology) & Sanford L. Braver (Arizona State University (ASU) – Department of Psychology) have posted When Do Laws Seem Fair? A Method for Measuring Community Views Using the Example of Family Law Rules (in When Laws Seem Fair: The Example of Family Law by Ira Ellman and Sanford Braver (2023)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Family law rules decide whether former intimate partners have continuing financial obligations to one another, how their property should be divided, and how parental responsibility should be allocated. All may agree such laws should be fair, but how is fairness judged? In their new book When Laws Seem Fair, Ira Ellman and Sanford Braver present a decades’ worth of empirical studies measuring an important benchmark of fairness: what seems fair to ordinary people. They asked large random samples of community members, in the U.S. and Britain, for their judgment of the fair resolution of many hundreds of hypothetical cases. They found patterns in their judgments that persisted across demographic groups and factual variations in the case, and concluded that rules inductively derived from these patterns often did a better job than legislatures and judges in balancing the valid but competing fairness claims such cases present. These studies should interest anyone who wants to understand when laws seem fair. The book presents the studies as originally published along with newly written chapters that synthesize and give context to their findings.
Recommended.