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University of Michigan Law School

Articles

1997

Certainty

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Towards A (Bayesian) Convergence?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1997

Towards A (Bayesian) Convergence?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

If I understand them correctly, several leading Bayesioskeptics (Allen, Callen, Stein) acknowledge - with varying degrees of specificity and varying degrees of grudgingness - that standard probability theory can be useful as an analytical tool in considering evidentiary doctrines and the probative value of evidentiary items.


Answering The Bayesioskeptical Challenge, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1997

Answering The Bayesioskeptical Challenge, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In recent years, some scholars of evidence, myself among them, have made active use of subjective probability theory - what is sometimes referred to as Bayesianism - in thinking about issues and problems related to the law of evidence. But, at the same time, this use has been challenged to various degrees and in various ways by scholars to whom I shall apply the collective, if somewhat misleading, label of Bayesioskeptics. I present this brief paper to defend this use of probability theory, and to discuss what I believe is its proper role in discourse about evidentiary issues.


Dealing With Evidentiary Deficiency, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1997

Dealing With Evidentiary Deficiency, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Lack of information distorts litigation. Claims or defenses that a party might prove easily, or that might even be undisputed, in a world of perfect information can be difficult or impossible to prove in the real world of imperfect information. Some information deficiencies are inevitable, at least in the sense that we could not eliminate them without incurring undue social costs. In some cases, however, a person's conduct may have caused the deficiency. More generally, the person may have had available a reasonable alternative course of conduct that would have eliminated, or at least mitigated, the deficiency. Ariel Porat and …