Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence: The Uses and Limits of Bayesianism

by Peter Tillers (Editor), E. Green (Editor)

This book explores the nature of factual inference in adjudication. The book should be useful to students of law in Continental Europe as well as to students of Anglo-American law. While a good many countries do not use the sorts of rules of evidence found in the Anglo-American legal tradition, their procedural systems nevertheless frequently use a variety of rules and principles to regulate and structure the acquisition, presentation, and evalu­ ation of evidence. In this sense, almost all legal systems have a law of proof. This book should also be useful to scholars in fields other than law. While the papers focus on inference in adjudication, they deal with a wide variety of issues that are important in disciplines such as the philosophy of science, statistics, and psychology. For example, there is extensive discussion of the role of generalizations and hypotheses in inference and of the significance of the fact that the actors who evaluate data also in some sense constitute the data that they evaluate. Furthermore, explanations of the manner in which some legal systems structure fact-finding processes may highlight features of inferential processes that have yet to be adequately tackled by scholars in fields other than law.

356 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Otto Hahaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better and more up-to-date books exist, for example, see Mike Redmayne's books. This is from the age before DNA testing, so most of the examples are rather artificial. I read one third of it and then decided that I really need to read something more modern and technical. But there are probably (ha!) some useful bits for someone who is interested in old arguments against Bayesianism.

Interestingly, someone (I should have written done who) complains here that this Bayesianism craze is comparable to a previous logic craze in law, which also died out. Now, more than 30 years after the logic craze, computational law (or legal studies), based on logic and computing, is actually starting to become reality.

And leafing through to the rest of the book, I happened to notice a reference to "The sign of three" that might be much more fun.