Frederick Schauer: Statistical Evidence and the Problem of Specification
Event date
21 January 2021
Event time
17:00
Oxford week
Venue
LIVE ONLINE SEMINAR
Speaker(s)
Frederick Schauer
On 21 January 2021 at 17:00 (UK time), Prof. Frederick Schauer will present his paper 'Statistical Evidence and the Problem of Specification'.
Frederick Schauer is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and Frank Stanton Professor (Emeritus) of the First Amendment at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is well known for his work on American constitutional law and on legal reasoning.
Abstract
Philosophical debates over statistical evidence have long been framed and dominated by L. Jonathan Cohen’s Paradox of the Gatecrasher, as well as by a related hypothetical commonly called Prison Yard. Both of these examples, however, suffer from the same flaw, in that they suppose that the legal system starts with a defendant and then attempts to determine if that defendant has committed some unspecified or under-specified act. But this gets things backwards. If, as is the case in actual legal practice, we start with a sufficiently specified act and then attempt to determine if the defendant has committed it, the statistics look very different, and these prominent examples no longer present the paradox they are claimed to support. Examining the issue of specification, however, does more than simply undercut the most prominent examples in a long and extensive literature. The examination also raises normative issues challenging the legal system’s traditional reluctance to base liability on the aggregation of alleged wrongs whose individual probabilities fall short of the applicable burden of proof.
Abstract
Philosophical debates over statistical evidence have long been framed and dominated by L. Jonathan Cohen’s Paradox of the Gatecrasher, as well as by a related hypothetical commonly called Prison Yard. Both of these examples, however, suffer from the same flaw, in that they suppose that the legal system starts with a defendant and then attempts to determine if that defendant has committed some unspecified or under-specified act. But this gets things backwards. If, as is the case in actual legal practice, we start with a sufficiently specified act and then attempt to determine if the defendant has committed it, the statistics look very different, and these prominent examples no longer present the paradox they are claimed to support. Examining the issue of specification, however, does more than simply undercut the most prominent examples in a long and extensive literature. The examination also raises normative issues challenging the legal system’s traditional reluctance to base liability on the aggregation of alleged wrongs whose individual probabilities fall short of the applicable burden of proof.
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