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This book has illustrated the advantages and drawbacks of chance and randomized social decision-making, claiming that arguments concerning such decision-making more often than not require qualification. Detailed scrutiny of randomized legal decision-making compels us to confront difficult, sometimes uncomfortable, questions concerning the role of reason in law and how we conceptualize justice. Although we are often understandably wary of resorting to lotteries to determine outcomes of legal significance, the idea that randomization might be employed more extensively within legal decision-making contexts ought not to be dismissed cursorily. Rigid application of some particular decision-making criterion to settle disputes might render adjudication less fraught with complexity and ambiguity. Depending on the criterion used, such application might even make the process of adjudication less partial. If the criterion is easy to apply, moreover, the costs of decision-making are likely to be reduced. One criterion which offers all of these qualities is random selection.

While the lottery has never been adopted as a general social decision-making tool, it has, in the past, been used to resolve a fairly wide variety of matters. Yet, today, to seriously entertain the prospect of extensive social decision-making by resort to lot (and hence, chance) would probably strike most people as absurd. The outcome of casting lots was once regarded not as random but as the revelation of divine intent. While divination by lot can be traced back at least as far as the ninth century BC, it would be wrong to regard the practice as wholly archaic. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, lotteries were regarded in medieval times as a means of getting God to speak. It may sometimes be the case that refusal to entertain the possibility of political and legal decision-making by resort to randomization betrays not human rationality but quite the opposite. Reluctance to use lotteries for political purposes such as elections is understandable, but misplaced. There are many arguments which might be advanced in support of randomness in political selection.

Chance offers no guarantee that one will get the outcome that one desires. Just as we can be its beneficiaries, so too we may be its victims. Luck rests at the foundation of our moral judgements: the actions on which we are judged emerge from a world which we do not control. The notion of ‘moral luck’ is especially unnerving because there seems to be something in our conception of morality that arouses opposition to the idea that moral responsibility, or moral merit, or moral blame, should be subject to luck. Chance is an integral, ineradicable feature of law. Just as in other areas of life, being a beneficiary or a victim of the legal system will often be a matter of luck. This book articles the main problems associated with legal decision-making and shows that these problems may be overstated. This book considers what sort of case might be made for the use of lotteries in legal and social decision-making contexts.

Within the literature of legal philosophy, the idea of deciding by lot to dispense justice is almost wholly insignificant. It is a quirky idea that sometimes serves as a foil for those endeavouring to develop themes which are considered far more compelling and enlightening. At other times, the notion of deciding by lot is given the most cursory of treatments — examined and packed away within, say, the space of a footnote. Lotteries take many forms. They may be constructed or natural. They may be simple or complex. They may accord even chances or they may be (deliberately or naturally) biased. They may operate in isolation or in combination with other modes of decision-making. Conscious appeal to, and reliance on, chance are practices not uncommon to certain cultures and historical periods. This book also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of randomized social decision-making, as well as the arguments in favour of randomization. In addition, it advances a distinctly tentative argument for what is termed adjudication in the shadow of a lottery.