Law Commons^™

Trial By Traditional Probability, Relative Plausibility, Or Belief Function?, Kevin M. Clermont

Case Western Reserve Law Review

Almost incredible is that no one has ever formulated an adequate model for applying the standard of proof. What does the law call for? The usual formulation is that the factfinder must roughly test the finding on a scale of likelihood. So, the finding in a civil case must at least be more likely than not or, for the theoretically adventuresome, more than fifty percent probable. Yet everyone concedes that this formulation captures neither how human factfinders actually work nor, more surprisingly, how theory tells us that factfinders should work.

An emerging notion that the factfinder should compare the plaintiff’s …