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Many Minds, Many Mdl Judges, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

My focus here is on a cost that has been surprisingly neglected by scholars but may be the greatest cost of them all: the accurate adjudication of legal claims and defenses. I suspect it is intuitive to most of us that asking one person to decide something instead of inviting many other people to weigh in probably reduces the quality of the resulting decision. There is a literature that formalizes this intuition called "many-minds" scholarship. It proceeds from a famous mathematics proof known as the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Although some people have questioned the applicability of many-minds theories to legal …