Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Yale Law Journal

Abstract

In this Article, we offer some observations about the attributes of multijudge courts and their relationship to basic themes in the theory of adjudication. While this first venture falls short of a comprehensive theory, it involves considerably more than minor tinkering with conventional understandings of adjudication. Our effort to incorporate the fact of group decisionmaking into analysis of the judging process has led us to generate a fundamental distinction between "preference aggregation" and "judgment aggregation" in processes of group decisionmaking, to reconsider the traditional taxonomy of schools of jurisprudence in terms of this distinction, to reflect on the idea of representation, and to refine and distinguish the concepts of "consistency" and "coherence" as they apply to judicial decisionmaking. From the midst of these analytical turnings, three propositions emerge with some force. First, given a reasonable understanding of what the job of judging is and under reasonable assumptions about how well individual judges are likely to do it, enlarging the number of judges who sit on a court can be expected to improve the court's performance. Second, multijudge courts are quite capable of behaving consistently. If each judge on a court acts consistently from case to case, so too will the court that they constitute. Third, the same simple relationship between individual and group judicial performance does not hold for coherence. The coherence of a body of law generated by a court depends not only on the ability and commitment of each of its constituent judges to behave coherently, but also upon the nature and congruence of these judges' understandings of the criteria for coherence.

First Page

82

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2307/796436

Volume

96

Publication Date

1986

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