Industrial Accident Liability Policy of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

of actors within various public policy spheres.1 This suggests that law and courts (i.e., behavior within courts) may have independent social consequences. The policy statements made by judges, as well as by legislatures, and the judicial decisions with respect to who wins in individual cases (i.e., the pattern of winners coming out of the courts) may independently affect the behavior of actors-including judges-within the relevant policy spheres. The perennial debate over whether it is what judges say, or what judges do, that matters simply misses the point. This has led to a rather crucial deficiency in the literature of empirical work that considers data on the interaction among appellate courts, trial courts, and nonjudicial actors. In this paper I attempt to show how that deficiency can be overcome with the use of conventional econometric techniques and the selection of dependent variables more encompassing than court outcomes. The second task of this paper is to assess the role law and courts have played in a specific policy area and the relationship between courts and legislatures in the establishment and development of that policy. The particular area of public policy analyzed is the policy relating to industrial accident prevention and compensation, and the empirical analysis focuses on