This chapter examines the design of legal institutions, as opposed to the allocation of tasks across institutions whose design is taken as fixed. It argues that epistemic considerations call for professional diversity in the judiciary, specifically on the United States Supreme Court: there should be at least some justices who are not lawyers. The chapter pursues both a substantive and a methodological point. Substantively, when the limits of reason are taken into account, the professional monopoly of judicial positions by lawyers is seen to be undesirable, contrary to a central sociological assumption of epistemic legalism. Methodologically, it shows an epistemic argument that survives all the grounds for skepticism laid out in Chapter 1.
Keywords: legal institutions, judiciary, reason, judges, epistemic argument, limits of reason,