Discretion in a Behavioral Perspective: The Case of a Public Housing Eviction Board

Abstract

Abstract The discretion that law grants may be examined as a quality of rules, as a quality of behavior, or as a sense that people have of their freedom to act.1 Thus legal rules give discretion, people exercise discretion, and individuals contemplating or reflecting on action may feel as if their actions are or were discretionary. Discretion as a quality of rules is a topic much mooted by legal philosophers and lawyers writing from an analytic perspective (Hart and Sacks 1958; Rosenberg 1970-1; Greenawalt 1975; Dworkin 1977b; Post 1984; Fletcher 1984; Barak 1989). Discretion in its other two senses is more appropriately studied by social scientists. While the phenomenology oflegal discretion has received little empirical attention, discretionary behavior has been the focus of considerable research by social scientists and empirically oriented lawyers studying the legal system. (See, e.g., Goldstein 1960; Schubert 1963; Sudnow 1965; Skolnick 1966; Davis 1969; Alschuler 1975; Heumann 1978; Kagan 1978; Emerson 1983; Hawkins 1984; Pepinsky 1984.)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.