More by Bex and Verheij on Story-Based Accounts of Inference in Law

Floris Bex and Bart Verheij, Legal Stories and the Process of Proof, Artificial Intelligence and Law (Dec. issue, 2012)
Abstract
In this paper, we continue our research on a hybrid narrative-argumentative approach to evidential reasoning in the law by showing the interaction between factual reasoning (providing a proof for ‘what happened’ in a case) and legal reasoning (making a decision based on the proof). First we extend the hybrid theory by making the connection with reasoning towards legal consequences. We then emphasise the role of legal stories (as opposed to the factual stories of the hybrid theory). Legal stories provide a coherent, holistic legal perspective on a case. They steer what needs to be proven but are also selected on the basis of what can be proven. We show how these legal stories can be used to model a shift of the legal perspective on a case, and we discuss how gaps in a legal story can be filled using a factual story (i.e. the process of reasoning with circumstantial evidence). Our model is illustrated by a discussion of the Dutch Wamel murder case.
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This paper is another step in the important work that Bex and Verheij have been doing in exploring the relationship between - on the one hand - conventional probabilistic accounts of factual inference and - on the other hand - what they call story-based accounts. (In this paper they apparently emphasize the relationship between story-based accounts of proof and argumentation-based accounts, and they say they extend their "hybrid" theory to argument about law, or legal hypotheses.)
I think Bex and Verheij are right in assuming that probabilistic and story-based accounts of inference and proof are complementary rather than rival accounts.
I will be interested in part to find out whether Bex and Verheij distinguish carefully enough between (1) chronologies, (2) scenarios ("causal hypotheses"), and (3) narratives (which involve in part the use of devices that have the power to persuade by moving emotion, or sentiment, as well the power to move reason, or logic).
I will also want to know whether Bex and Verheij defend the proposition that story-based approaches to inferences about facts and inferences about legal rules are normatively defensible only if and only to the extent that such approaches advance the search for the "truth."

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Mass Murder on a Monumental Scale

If the story that Yang Jisheng tells (see below) is true, one is led to wonder how the murder of 36 million people can pass almost unnoticed.
Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 NYTimes Sunday Book Review (Dec. 7, 2012):
In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”
[snip, snip]
Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and “greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists, “outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang.
[snip, snip]
Nowadays, Yang asserts, “rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end.” He hopes “Tombstone” will help banish the “historical amnesia imposed by those in power” and spur his countrymen to “renounce man-made calamity, darkness and evil.” While guardedly hopeful about the rise of democracy, Yang is ultimately a realist. Despite China’s economic and social transformation, this courageous man concludes, “the political system remains unchanged.” “Tombstone” doesn’t directly challenge China’s current regime, nor is its author part of an organized movement. And so, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Yang Jisheng is not serving a long prison sentence. But he has driven a stake through the hearts of Mao Zedong and the party he helped found.


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Getting Rich Running Communities of Scholars

The notion that nonprofit universities and colleges are nonprofits seems positively quaint - unless you're talking about Catholic colleges and universities:

Justin Pope, Private College Presidents Pay Was up Slightly (Dec. 10, 2012):

Compensation for private college presidents has continued to drift upward, while the number crossing the $1 million barrier — a signal of prestige, and a magnet for criticism — held steady at 36, according to a new survey.

The latest annual compilation by The Chronicle of Higher Education covers data from 2010, due to lag time in the release of federal tax information. That year, median compensation for the 494 presidents in the survey — leaders of institutions with budgets of at least $50 million — was $396,649, or 2.8 percent higher than in last year's survey. But median base salary fell slightly, by less than 1 percent.

The highest paid was Bob Kerrey, who was president of The New School in New York until December 2010 before returning to Nebraska, where he made an unsuccessful run to return to the U.S Senate. Kerrey's total compensation was valued at just over $3 million. His base salary was just over $600,000, but he received the remainder in the form of a retention bonus, deferred compensation and other benefits.

[snip, snip]

Then there's the other end of the scale — presidents of roughly two dozen Roman Catholic institutions including Villanova University, Boston College, Marquette and a number of smaller schools, whose compensation is zero. All are either clergy or members of religious orders.

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