New Value Institute

Lab

Adversarial Judgment Lab

Develops and tests procedures that make contested judgment public, revisable, and accountable.

Development Focus

Adversarial Judgment and Legitimacy

Lab Function

Procedural and legitimacy method development

Current Status

Active procedural method development

Central Question

How is judgment produced, and what makes a procedure of judgment publicly legitimate?

What the Lab Develops

Derived from JUDGE ME, the Lab isolates and tests procedural relations through which judgment becomes consequential: roles, testimony, evidence, expertise, revision, authority, and unresolved conflict. It examines how legitimacy is produced, challenged, or weakened when judgment cannot be neutral or delegated to a metric.

Founding Corpus

JUDGE ME

Source Materials

  • Claimant and defendant positions
  • Testimony
  • Expert framing
  • Cross-examination
  • Revisable judgment
  • Situated authority
  • Procedural rupture
  • The relationship between social judgment and self-adjudication

Development and Testing

The Lab begins from the structure of JUDGE ME and separates the procedural operations through which judgment is organised: roles, evidence, authority, testimony, accusation, defence, spectatorship, jury, verdict, criteria formation, and unresolved conflict.

It tests how contested values can enter a public procedure without being flattened into false objectivity, how criteria are formed, and how legitimacy is granted or withheld.

Selected procedural relations may be tested only in carefully bounded institutional contexts. The Lab is not a ready-to-deploy judging system.

Procedural Relations under Test

  • Opposed positions
  • Differentiated testimony and expertise
  • Cross-examination
  • Revisable judgment
  • Criteria formation
  • Situated authority
  • Procedural rupture
  • Unresolved conflict

Outputs

  • Procedural analyses
  • Legitimacy frameworks
  • Comparative judgment studies
  • Bounded procedural tests
  • Human and AI-assisted judgment assessments

Possible Test Contexts

  • Cultural funding and selection
  • Juries
  • Peer review
  • Ethics panels
  • Public hearings
  • Institutional accountability
  • AI-assisted judgment
  • Contested public decisions

Development beyond the Source Work

Development beyond the founding work proceeds through comparative cases, legal and institutional expertise, and bounded procedural tests.

Documentation

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Develop and test procedures for juries, selections, hearings, or other defined cases involving legitimacy and accountability.

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