money by using their motor vehicles less; consequently the reduction in
accidents and fatalities may in whole or in part arise from reduced use of
motor vehicles.
Third, society is constantly changing. When a law is passed and operates
many other changes take place at the same time. Consequently, it is difficult
and often impossible for social science to separate and analyse the effect of
any single factor including law.
499
Legislative Impact Analysis: Experimental Law
Studying how law works in the field (in the wild as it were) is a useful pursuit
that gains some insights. Nevertheless, it is not totally scientific. Viewing law
as it operates in society almost invariable fails to subject legislation and its
impact to totally scientific study so we cannot be certain that a law will cause a
desired outcome. Therefore, in the planning stage it is impossible to be certain
of the future effect of a proposed law.
There may be something of a solution to this problem from the field of
experimental law. The background to the development of this field comes
from two other disciplines, economics and archaeology. Traditionally these
did not rely on experimentation but have now started to do so. In the ideal
case, they perform an experiment under perfectly controlled conditions that
tests the effects of a single variable. Where this is not possible, they seek to
recreate and examine as best they can the conditions that
they seek to
investigate. Because of these innovations there is now an extensive literature on
both experimental economics
500
and experimental archaeology.
501
Not surprisingly, jurists who wish to research the effect of laws have followed
suit and developed the field of experimental jurisprudence. One force that
moved legal scholarship in this direction consisted of a flourishing production
of output in the field of law and economics. Once economics became
experimental, it was natural for this development to flow on, or at least trickle
down into, legal scholarship generally. Consequently, experimental law is now
___________________
499
See Mason (1993).
500
Smith (1980) (Vernon L Smith won the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for
his work in the field), Kagel and Roth (1995) (a handbook), and Siakantaris, (2000)
which examines some of the problems. There is also a journal dedicated to the
task,
Experimental Economics, which is a Journal of the Economic Science
Association.
501
See for example Coles (1970), Stone and Planel (1999), Ingersoll, Tellen and
Macdonald (1977), Tringham (1978).
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