Judges are not economists and other reasons to be skeptical of contingent suppression orders: A response to professor Dripps

American Criminal Law Review

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 47-

  Thomas III, George C ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042410607     PISSN: 01640364     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (3)

1. I realize that a few judges are economists - Judge Frank Easterbrook, for example. What I mean by the title is that a background in economics is neither required nor even thought necessarily useful for judges. To put all of that in the title would be cumbersome, to say the least.
2. Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law - Newark. Several people read and commented helpfully on earlier drafts, including Alan Dalsass, John Douard, and Joshua Dressier. Special thanks to Barbara Schweiger, who pointed out a problem with the Dripps proposal that I had not seen, and to Keith Sharfman, who actually knows something about economics and who helpfully challenged several assumptions in an earlier draft. No one named here should be held accountable, of course, for the final version of the paper.
3. The first Supreme Court case to suppress evidence because of a constitutional violation was Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886), though the first case clearly holding that the Fourth Amendment required suppression (return to defendant) of evidence was Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 391-92 (1914). John Henry Wigmore hated rules that kept reliable evidence from the fact-finder and he attacked Boyd and Weeks often and with enthusiasm. See, e.g., 2 JOHN HENRY WIGMORE, A TREATISE ON EVIDENCE § 865 (2d ed. 1923).