ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s fascination with difficult legal issues and found expression in the doctoral dissertation, De casibus perplexis in jure, which he presented to the University of Altdorf at the tender age of twenty in 1666. Leibniz was prepared to move well beyond the close connection between expectation and equity that characterized the thought of the other founders of probability theory. There is no doubt that probabilistically grounded distribution of goods makes good common sense in matters of distributive justice. The Leibniz-Keynes approach is predicated on the principle of allocating to claimant a share that is proportional to their expectation, for example, partitioning 50:50 between two players who have an equal chance of winning. In his discussion of “mathematical expectation,” which, Aristotle maintains, “is a technical expression originally derived from the scientific study of gambling and games of chance, and stands for the product of the possible gain with the probability of attaining it.”
