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Evidence, Probability, And The Burden Of Proof, Ronald J. Allen, Alex Stein

Alex Stein

This Article analyzes the probabilistic and epistemological underpinnings of the burden-of-proof doctrine. We show that this doctrine is best understood as instructing factfinders to determine which of the parties’ conflicting stories makes most sense in terms of coherence, consilience, causality, and evidential coverage. By applying this method, factfinders should try—and will often succeed—to establish the truth, rather than a statistical surrogate of the truth, while securing the appropriate allocation of the risk of error. Descriptively, we argue that this understanding of the doctrine—the “relative plausibility theory”—corresponds to our courts’ practice. Prescriptively, we argue that the relative-plausibility method is operationally superior …