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The Condorcet Jury Theorem And Judicial Decisionmaking: A Reply To Saul Levmore, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

In Ruling Majorities and Reasoning Pluralities, Professor Saul Levmore explores the "division of labor" between the various thresholds of agreement required for collective action - supermajority, simple majority, or plurality rule. His particular emphasis is on the choice between the last two options. To improve our understanding of this choice in various settings, Professor Levmore considers the relationship between two well-known contributions to the study of group decisionmaking, namely, the Condorcet Jury Theorem and the Condorcet Criterion, which have not generally been treated together. This essay explores the relationship between these two insights in the context of judicial decisionmaking. Counterintuitively, …