The Right Coast

September 23, 2005
 
Crowd wisdom and common law
By Tom Smith

Very cool link below by Professor Rapport to Google's crowd wisdom tool.

It makes we wonder to what extent common law decision making could be characterized as a crowd wisdom mechanism. If 100 judges decide on some issue, and their outcomes could be characterized as taking a normal or normalish distribution, the mean decision, you might say, represented the wisdom of that crowd. Do mean decisions turn out to be the rule that emerges from a common law process? I don't know, but I don't think it is a crazy suggestion. If it is a good idea, it has probably already been published and maybe even had a symposium issue about it.