HOW ECONOMISTS ENTERED THE ‘NUMBERS GAME’: MEASURING DISCRIMINATION IN THE US COURTROOMS, 1971–1989

Abstract

The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method: multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relate to the debates in academia in the 1980s. By 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.