In this paper, we characterize adversarial decision-making as a choice between competing interpretations of evidence ("models") constructed by interested parties. We show that if a court cannot perfectly determine which party's model is more likely to have generated the evidence, then...

The advantage of the adversarial regime of judicial decision-making is the superior information of the parties while the advantage of an idealized inquisitorial regime is its neutrality. We model the tradeoff by characterizing the properties of costly estimators used by each regime. The...