Law Commons^™

On The Selection Of Judges In International Figure Skating, Michael B. Abramowicz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay discusses the system that the International Skating Union (ISU) has long used to select skating judges for competitions and suggests that this system creates problems of partisanship, incentivizing national skating federations to pick judges who are most likely to favor the federation’s interests while also incentivizing skating judges to favor their national federations. I offer an alternative approach to the ISU’s present method of selecting judges, a tournament-like system that could be used to pick judges objectively by rating judges based on the correlation of their scores with those of other judges and allowing those with higher correlation …