Important New Book: Evidence, Inference and Enquiry (Oxford 2011)

August 2011 will see the publication of a collection of papers on "evidence, inference and enquiry." The collection is edited by William Twining, Philip Dawid and Dimitra Vasilaki. The publisher is Oxford University Press. The papers in this collection grew out of a unique research programme at University College London. The papers in the collection were presented at the British Academy in 2007. I had the great privilege of contributing a paper.

• Please ignore the two typos that appear below in the subtitle of my essay; they will be corrected.

Transformative Scholarship v. Original Scholarship

I have recently heard it said (again) -- by American legal academics -- that legal academics should aim at producing "transformative" scholarship. The general idea seems to be that the best scholarship is scholarship that upends everything we know and believe.

I have a very different view of how original scholarship is done.

First, original scholarship is done by hedgehogs, by people who pay attention to details, rather than by birds who (purport to) soar high above the earth, surveying the landscape.

Second, truly "revolutionary," or "transformative," scholarship is not scholarship that upends and overthrows everything we know. There is an important sense in which there is nothing new under the sun. Truly revolutionary scholarship builds on what has been accomplished and discovered -- usually during the course of many generations.

Truly original scholarship puts the existing stock of human knowledge into a new light. Truly original and transformative scholarship is not scholarship that overthrows everything we previously thought and believed.

Einstein's scholarship was revolutionary. But it was not revolutionary because Einstein rejected Newtonian physics. Einstein did not reject or overthrow Newtonian physics and classical mechanics. Einstein put Newtonian physics into a new framework, a framework that would have literally been inconceivable without Newtonian physics.

Great scholars must have intellectual humility. (It would be nice if they were also humble human beings in general; but that's asking far too much -- of American law professors, in any event.)



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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.

SSRN URL for "The Structure and the Logic of Proof in Trials"

The SSRN URL for the abstract of and the link to my paper "The Structure and the Logic of Proof in Trials" is http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1800864




The final paper and the comments thereon are available at 10 Law, Probability and Risk 1 (2011).

Spindle Law Interview: Robert O'Neil

See Interview with Robert O'Neil

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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.

A Cluster of Bodies

Is a cluster of ten women's remains found along about a ten-mile stretch of a Long Island beach near New York City strong evidence that a serial killer is or was at work? See Sean Gardiner, "New Bones in Killing Probe," Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2011). Would we want to know if there is evidence of foul play in addition to the discovery of the human remains? Would we want to know how long the remains of the various women had been there? Would we want to know how many women usually go missing and die unseen even in the absence of homicidal foul play? Would we want to know something about the movement of the ocean currents along that sad stretch of beach?

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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.

How to Become a Professor: Start a Civil War

Zain Verjee, Source: Gbagbo offered US professorship to end crisis CNN World (April 12, 2011).

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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.