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Mátyás Bencze, Gar Yein Ng (eds.): How to Measure the Quality of Judicial Reasoning. Springer, 2018

2019; Akadémiai Kiadó; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1556/2052.2019.60108

2560-1067

Lea Pődör,

Judicial and Constitutional Studies

Lea Pődör ⃰ 'Measuring the unmeasurable' -this is the main concept of the book and it is also the title of the editors' introductory study.This phrase also wonderfully describes the research project's and the authors' hard challenge.To write about something and then to explain its subsequent quality, judicial reasoning in this case is something very unique, individual, complex and different on a case by case basis.The book is edited by Mátyás Bencze and Gar Yein Ng and the volume concentrates on the quality of judicial forums' reasoning method.The project was based on the cooperation between Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre of Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies and the University of Debrecen, Faculty of Law.The book consists of fifteen studies, conducted with the assistance of several prestigious legal scholars and legal practitioners.The book has two main parts, in which the first contains essays from the perspective of legal theory, legal sociology, philosophy and behavioural law and economics.The other part colligates the main conclusions from the practice of some national and international judicial forums.Judges, judicial decisions and judicial argumentation have always had both academic and societal attention, so it may be thought that the issue is well and widely known.It is an age-old experience that judges have three important challenges: decide every single case they get; decision should be based on written rules; and (last but not least) decision should be fair and just. 1 But what is praxis's reality, would judicial work be this simple or not?It is well advised to think over the problem and to concentrate on the quality of reasoning which has become an accentuated requirement in the past years.The purpose of this research project was to properly answer a difficult question -what is expected from judicial reasoning?Are there any aspects, standards, or scales, which can highlight and measure the quality of judges' work?There are some measuring methods from the legal philosophy tradition, e.g., there are great maxims in Roman law, such as ius est ars boni et aequi, summum ius summa iniuria, etc. Legal culture has also created several famous role-models in connection with judges' reasoning methods; these famous descriptions consist of judges who represent the main features of an ideal decision-maker. 2