Probabilistic Interpretation, Part II: The Case of the Speluncean Explorers

Abstract

Lon Fuller’s “Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” a hypothetical murder case involving a group of cannibalistic cave explorers, is one of the most well-known thought experiments in the field of law. Legal scholars and law students continue to use Fuller’s famous case to explore a wide variety of theoretical and practical questions in law. To our knowledge, however, no one has used Fuller’s imaginary case to address questions of judicial voting or human vs. machine judges. In this paper, we imagine an alternative system of appellate voting, a cardinal voting system in which judges assign a score to their preferred judicial outcome. Appellate courts, including the make-believe court in Fuller’s hypothetical, generally use an ordinal system of voting (i.e. one judge, one vote) to decide cases. By contrast, we propose a simple cardinal voting system for deciding appellate cases, using Fuller’s famous hypothetical to illustrate how our simple system of cardinal voting would work in practice.