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Uncertainty Revisited: Legal Prediction And Legal Postdiction, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel

Michigan Law Review

Legal scholarship, following rational-choice theory, has traditionally treated uncertainty as a single category. A large body of experimental studies, however, has established that individuals treat guesses concerning the future differently than guesses concerning the past. Even where objective probabilities and payoffs are identical, individuals are much more willing to predict a future event (and are more confident in the accuracy of their predictions) than they are willing to postdict a past event (and are also less confident in the accuracy of their postdiction). For example, individuals are more willing to bet on the results of a future die toss than …