Judges, justice and power: reorienting decision science

The field of Judgment and Decision Making has had tremendous impact in understanding and improving decision-making in several domains from business to medicine, and it is now time to turn our efforts to the legal domain. The two schools of thought that dominate our field (coherence and correspondence) have generated a set of rich ideas as well as useful methods that can be applied in this context. However, both schools have been somewhat narrow in their focus on what is a ‘good’ decision. If we care about ‘good’ decisions, then we must also care about ‘just’ decisions. We ought to use our science to scrutinize the exercise of judicial power in the search for justice, and therefore in the service of justice. The direct relevance to our field is the fact that justice is a product of decisions, and these decisions are made under conditions of risk and uncertainty. We could reorient our science and put our intellectual resources into extending and applying our theories and methods in the following three ways. (1) Focus on justice as an outcome alongside, or even above the other sorts of outcomes we routinely study. (2) Study the exercise of judicial power in all its guises. (3) Scrutinize the algorithms that increasingly influence or replace judicial power. Justice can be modelled, measured, and improved — but only if we choose to prioritize it.