Article

On Law’s Tiebreakers

Adam M. Samaha

Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

Thanks to Matt Adler, Douglas Baird, Omri Ben-Shahar, Lee Fennell, Barry Friedman, Jake Gersen, Aziz Huq, Dan Kahan, Saul Levmore, Anup Malani, Tom Miles, Richard McAdams, Rick Pildes, Eric Posner, Jennifer Rothman, and David Strauss for helpful conversations and comments on an earlier draft, and to workshop participants at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, The University of Chicago Law School, and New York University Law School’s Constitutional Theory Colloquium. The latter workshop had to be cut short, and dramatically so, but Rick Pildes and David Golove made sure that I benefited from the participants’ generous attention to the Article. Hanna Chung and Daniel Roberts provided excellent research assistance. Mistakes are mine.

Tiebreakers are familiar tools for decisionmaking. Ready examples include penalty shootouts in soccer matches and vice presidents breaking tie votes in the Senate. But we lack a precise understanding of the concept and a normative theory for the use of tiebreakers. This Article strictly defines a tiebreaker as a kind of lexically inferior decision rule and then builds justifications for tiebreaking decision structures. Concentrating on situations in which ties are considered intolerable, the Article suggests methods for either preventing ties or designing sensible tiebreakers. As to the latter, tradeoffs are identified for the use of random variables, morally relevant variables, and doublecounted variables within a lexically inferior decision rule. Finally, the Article applies its conceptual and normative lessons to three problems: the best design for affirmative action programs, the proper interpretive method for legal texts, and the core function of adjudication. The closing sections evaluate law and adjudication as one large tiebreaker for the rest of social life, with contrasts and comparisons to some other major theories for the mission of courts in the United States.

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