Academic

Laudan on the Criminal Standard of Proof & Inference to the Best Explanation

By Lawrence Solum

Larry Laudan (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas and University of Texas School of Law) has posted Strange Bedfellows: Inference to the Best Erxplanation and the Criminal Standard of Proof on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Several philosophers and evidence scholars have recently suggested that both the criminal and civil standards of proof could be modelled using the schema known as inference to the best explanation. This paper challenges that proposal, showing that being the best explanation of a certain set of facts is too weak to serve as an explication of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and too strong to capture the meaning of the preponderance of the evidence.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 08, 2008 (boomark / email).