Putting a Case Together

The following 2007 essay by James W. McElhaney neatly summarizes some of the main things that a litigator must do to prepare a case for trial:

Putting a Case Together 
There are some pretrial preparation tasks - e.g., exploratory investigation and credibility assessment -- that McElhaney does not list. But it's hard to say everything at once. If I am not mistaken, the current version of the Tillers-Schum MarshalPlan system captures all of the tasks that McElhany lists.

I call the current iteration of this software application "MarshalPlan 5.5" You can download this app for use on a Windows computer by going to http://tillers.net/MarshalPlan.5.5/ and opening the subfolder "Windows" and then clicking on MarshalPlan 5.5exe (NOT MarshalPlan.5.5exe).

Apple Corporation seems to strip this exe file of its ability to run on Apple computers. Sorry!

The current limitations of the MarshalPlan software application are discussed here. 


&&& The dynamic evidence page

Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

More on Neurobabble

Alissa Quart,  Neuroscience: Under Attack NYTimes (Nov. 23, 2012):
"A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.
[snip, snip]
"The problem isn’t solely that self-appointed scientists often jump to faulty conclusions about neuroscience. It’s also that they are part of a larger cultural tendency, in which neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic, literary and journalistic interpretations of experience. A number of the neuro doubters are also humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines, creating phenomena like neuro law, which, in part, uses the evidence of damaged brains as the basis for legal defense of people accused of heinous crimes, or neuroaesthetics, a trendy blend of art history and neuroscience."
See my earlier posts on neurobabble                
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The dynamic evidence page

Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

So What If Every Fingerprint Is Unique?

David Kaye, Beyond Uniqueness: The Birthday Paradox, Source Attribution, and Individualization in Forensic Science Testimony, Law, __ Probability and Risk 1-9 (Advance Access, Nov. 5, 2012) doi:10.1093/lpr/mgs031 (footnotes omitted),  :
"The fact that the surfaces of every individual’s fingers are unique (at a sufficient level of detail) is not, in itself, a persuasive argument for universal individualization.The uniqueness argument proves too much, for just as every finger presumably is unique, so is every latent print, even those from the same skin."
Abstract of Paper:
For many decades, forensic science identification experts have insisted that they can ‘individualize’ traces such as fingerprints and toolmarks to the one and only one object that produced them. They have relied on a theory of global uniqueness of patterns as the basis for such individualization. Although forensic practitioners and theorists are moving toward a more probabilistic understanding of pattern matching, textbooks and reference works continue to assert that uniqueness justifies individualization and that experience demonstrates discernible uniqueness. One response to the last claim applies a famous problem in probability theory—the Birthday Problem—to the forensic realm to show that even an extensive record of uniqueness does little to prove that all such patterns are unique. This essay describes the probabilistic reasoning and its limits. It argues that the logic of the Birthday Paradox does indeed undercut the theory of global, general uniqueness, but that the reasoning is logically compatible with opinion testimony that a specific object is nearly certain to be the source of a pattern or trace. It also notes some alternatives to categorical claims of individualization, whether those claims are based on the theory of global, general uniqueness or instead on some less sweeping and more defensible theory.

                                               

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The dynamic evidence page

Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

Relationship between Fingerprint Identification and Fingerprint Details?

What is the relationship between the accuracy of fingerprint identification and the degree of the detail in a fingerprint image? Is it always true that the more granular the fingerprint image, the more accurate the identification process?
I think not.
What do you think?

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The dynamic evidence page

Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

Giving Away Higher Education?

Is a revolution in higher education underway? Will the higher education formerly available only to selected and small groups of people become available to all takers? There are some early signs that the answer may be -- to a substantial extent - "yes." See, for example:

Tamar Lewin,  College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All  (Nov. 19, 2012):

"Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?

"In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier’s evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction — once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost — free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

Moreover, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, harness the power of their huge enrollments to teach in new ways, applying crowd-sourcing technology to discussion forums and grading and enabling professors to use online lectures and reserve on-campus class time for interaction with students"

A blurb by the NYTimes -- the blurb is called "Virtual U" -- announces, "This is the first article in a series that will examine free online college-level classes and how they are transforming higher education."

This is the kind of reportage that compels one to say that whatever reservations one may have about the New York Times, the newspaper (a/k/a media entity) is surely one of the best in the world.

MOOCs have an affinity with Google's ambition to make large chunks of massive libraries (e.g., university libraries) available - free - to the world. 

  &&& The dynamic evidence page

Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan