British Journal of Political Science

Table of Contents - July 2012 - Volume 42, Issue 03  

Research Article

Courts of Many Minds

Kai Spiekermann and Robert E. Goodin*

Abstract

In A Constitution of Many Minds Cass Sunstein argues that the three major approaches to constitutional interpretation – Traditionalism, Populism and Cosmopolitanism – all rely on some variation of a ‘many-minds’ argument. Here we assess each of these claims through the lens of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. In regard to the first two approaches we explore the implications of sequential influence among courts (past and foreign, respectively). In regard to the Populist approach, we consider the influence of opinion leaders.

(Online publication December 12 2011)

Footnotes

* London School of Economics (email: k.spiekermann@lse.ac.uk); Australian National University and University of Essex, respectively. This article was presented in 2010 at the Conference on Collective Knowledge and Epistemic Trust (Greifswald), the Annual Meeting of APSA, Washington, D.C., and the Faculty Workshop of Harvard Law School. The authors would like to thank those audiences for many insightful comments. They are grateful to three of the Journal's anonymous referees who provided instructive comments. Franz Dietrich kindly helped with some notational issues.