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Rough Justice, Alexandra Lahav

Alexandra D. Lahav

This Essay offers a new justification for rough justice. Rough justice, as I use the term here, is the attempt to resolve large numbers of cases by using statistical methods to give plaintiffs a justifiable amount of recovery. It replaces the trial, which most consider the ideal process for assigning value to cases. Ordinarily rough justice is justified on utilitarian grounds. But rough justice is not only efficient, it is also fair. In fact, even though individual litigation is often held out as the sine qua non of process, rough justice does a better job at obtaining fair results for …