Making the legal system more 'accurate' actually makes it less just because regular people can't afford to play anymore.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Precision's Price: Optimal Accuracy, the Justice Gap, and Legal AI
SSRN · 6325198
The Takeaway
The legal profession views 'precision' as a universal good, but this paper argues that high accuracy is actually a policy variable with a steep price. AI could bridge the 'justice gap' only if we are willing to accept lower precision, suggesting that our obsession with perfect procedural correctness is what actually prevents the poor from accessing the law.
From the abstract
This essay argues that legal precision should be treated as a policy variable, not a universal maxim. Precision-factual accuracy, doctrinal fidelity, citation integrity, and procedural correctness-supports correctness, professional discipline, and institutional legitimacy by making legal reasoning auditable. But the system largely counts only errors inside litigated disputes while undercounting a different failure: omission error. Claims go unfiled and defenses unraised because the cost of parti