Resurrecting Trial by Statistics

Jay Tidmarsh, Notre Dame Law School

Abstract

Always more popular among academics than among courts, trial by statistics died on June 20, 2011. On that day, in an opinion closely divided in other regards, the Supreme Court unanimously "disapprove[d] that novel project." The notion that a court could try a representative sample of monetary claims and extrapolate the average result to the remainder of the cases was finished.