Sunday, December 03, 2006

The Leading Experts on Reasonable Doubt

There is a new book about reasonable doubt:


This book, the publisher's NYTimes Book Review blurb states, contains the views of "85 of our most influential experts."

But I do not see the following names on the list of contributors:

Judge Jon Newman
Judge Jack B. Weinstein
Professor George Fisher
Professor James Q. Whitman
Well, you can't have an essay from every self-appointed expert, can you now? In any event, Jerry Falwell contributed an essay to the book. So did Jayson Blair. These fellows plainly know their law. In any event, they know the law better than, for example, Judge Weinstein does; about this there can be no reasonable doubt.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today's NYT ("When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces"):

"Typically, scientists don’t accept a finding unless, statistically, the odds are less than 1 in 20 that it occurred by chance. This standard is higher than the typical standard of proof in civil trials (“preponderance of the evidence”) and lower than the standard for criminal trials (“beyond a reasonable doubt”)."

The word "typical"! Tolstoy famously said-to the effect, that all marriages gone wrong are atypical.

Anonymous said...

Further, in the same article:
"The justices may also consider that when scientists confront a problem, they collect all the information they can about it and then draw conclusions."

H.Simon, bounded rationality and satisficing? Scientists are humans, too..