European University Institute Conference on Proportionality and Justice

The February 25-26, 2011, QAJF European University Institute (Florence) conference on "proportionality and justice" now has a complete and functioning web site. Please go there to see a description of the conference and to register if you wish to present a paper at the conference. People who would like to present a paper at the conference should submit an abstract by December 15. See dates.

I mention this conference on this blog because a substantial part of the conference will be devoted to the use of formal and quantitative methods to analyze (and perhaps to help regulate) evidential inference in legal proceedings such as trials.

So: Next year in Florence!

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Human Cognitive & Inferential Frailty?

On this blog I have occasionally questioned the general thrust of literature that emphasizes what a bad job human beings do of drawing inferences from evidence. I have been rather more impressed with how good a job human beings often seem to do when engaged in the difficult and complex job of drawing inferences from evidence. See Peter Tillers, Unconscious -- and Remarkably Complex! -- Inference (Nov. 15, 2007) (blog post) and especially Peter Tillers, Perceptual Errors (July 24, 2007) (blog post). I think this is one reason why my eye was drawn to the extraordinarily interesting article by Natalie Angier, Seeing the Natural World With a Physicist’s Lens, NYTimes (Nov. 1, 2010).

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.