ABSTRACT
Do higher legal costs and resulting economic ineffi ciencies imply a higher degree of accuracy in the U.S. court rulings? Is the truth better served in the U.S. courts than elsewhere? According to Tullock [1980], the available evidence appears to suggest otherwise. Tullock measured the error rate of the courts by comparing the decisions of two independent decision-making bodies about a given case. According to Tullock [1980, p. 32], if the litigants disagree, then one must be wrong. If both agree, then it is possible that both are wrong. Disagreements between litigants constitute a measure of the courts’ minimum error rate. Kalven and Zeisel [1966] found that while it is not possible to ascertain whether the judges or juries were in error, disagreements occurred in one-fourth of the cases examined. By contrast, Baldwin and McConnville [1979] found that the error rate in England was only about one in eight, suggesting that the common law in the U.S. results in economically less effi cient outcomes.
