ESTIMATION EVIDENCE Gelbach, Jonah B.
University of Pennsylvania law review,
02/2020, Letnik:
168, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This Article radically rethinks the treatment of statistical estimation evidence in civil litigation, focusing for convenience on the federal courts. It proposes an approach that harmonizes legal ...standards and statistical concepts, replacing the arbitrary and elevated standards of conventional hypothesis testing with an approach that fits what we otherwise think the preponderance standard means. Through careful argumentation using Bayesian hypothesis testing, the Article offers a fundamental default rule for statistical estimation evidence: if the evidence comes from a credibly designed and implemented study, then it is presumptively admissible and enough to withstand motions for judgment under either Rule 50 or Rule 56, whenever it points in the direction of the party offering it. In many situations, the fundamental default rule may be cast as the policy that evidence is legally sufficient and presumptively admissible whenever it yields a finding of statistical significance at the 50 percent level—equivalently, whenever its p-value is less than 0.5. Thus, the Article indicates that many courts' current practice is far too strict with respect to statistical estimation evidence. The Article also discusses the appropriate gatekeeping role for federal district courts under Federal Rules of Evidence 403 and 702, and it engages the question of when courts might legitimately move away from the fundamental default rule for policy reasons.
The effect of the suspect-corroborator relationship and number of corroborators on alibi assessments was examined across two experiments. In both experiments, we explored the effect of relationship ...type and number of corroborators on believability, likelihood of guilt, and decision to retain the suspect as the primary suspect; we increased the social distance between the alibi provider and suspect and the size of difference between the number of corroborators in Experiment 2. Collectively, our results support Olson and Wells' taxonomy of alibi believability as (a) any form of person evidence mitigates pre-alibi judgments of guilt (although there is a ceiling effect), and (b) alibis corroborated by non-motivated others were judged more favourably than those corroborated by motivated others. Our results lend support toward extending the original taxonomy to include the number of corroborators. The implications for the alibi assessments are discussed.
Before the profuse number of possibilities of legal facts taking place in cyberspace, one questions how to measure qualified evidence value for such occurrences in potential lawsuits. Therefore, this ...article aims to analyze a public instrument, the notarized minute, as a means to prove the legal facts that occurred in cyberspace. The conclusion is that, in the presence of the ever-changing contents in cyberspace, an instrument is needed to guarantee legal safety and significant evidence power in potential legal litigations, which is achieved through the recording of notarized minutes. The deductive approach and the monographic procedure were used as elements of the methodology. KEY WORDS: Notarized minute. Cyberspace. Law of evidence. Legal safety. Society information. Em face das quantitativas possibilidades de fatos juridicos ocorridos no ambito virtual, questiona-se como aferir valor probatorio qualificado para tais ocorrencias em futuros processos judiciais. Diante dessa problematica, o presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar o instrumento publico da ata notarial como meio de prova dos fatos juridicos ocorridos no ciberespaco. Conclui-se que diante mutabilidade de conteudos presentes no mundo virtual, faz-se necessario um instrumento que garanta seguranca juridica e assegure expressiva forca probante em futuros litigios judiciais, o que se perfectibiliza com a lavratura da ata notarial. Como metodologia, utiliza-se a abordagem dedutiva e o metodo de procedimento monografico. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Ata notarial. Ciberespaco. Direito probatorio. Seguranca juridica. Sociedade da Informacao.
Before the profuse number of possibilities of legal facts taking place in cyberspace, one questions how to measure qualified evidence value for such occurrences in potential lawsuits. Therefore, this ...article aims to analyze a public instrument, the notarized minute, as a means to prove the legal facts that occurred in cyberspace. The conclusion is that, in the presence of the ever-changing contents in cyberspace, an instrument is needed to guarantee legal safety and significant evidence power in potential legal litigations, which is achieved through the recording of notarized minutes. The deductive approach and the monographic procedure were used as elements of the methodology.
THE PROFICIENCY OF EXPERTS Garrett, Brandon L.; Mitchell, Gregory
University of Pennsylvania law review,
03/2018, Letnik:
166, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Expert evidence plays a crucial role in civil and criminal litigation. Changes in the rules concerning expert admissibility, following the Supreme Court's Daubert ruling, strengthened judicial review ...of the reliability and the validity of an expert's methods. Judges and scholars, however, have neglected the threshold question for expert evidence: whether a person should be qualified as an expert in the first place. Judges traditionally focus on credentials or experience when qualifying experts without regard to whether those criteria are good proxies for true expertise. We argue that credentials and experience are often poor proxies for proficiency. Qualification of an expert presumes that the witness can perform in a particular domain with a proficiency that non-experts cannot achieve, yet many experts cannot provide empirical evidence that they do in fact perform at high levels of proficiency. To demonstrate the importance of proficiency data, we collect and analyze two decades of proficiency testing of latent fingerprint examiners. In this important domain, we found surprisingly high rates offalse positive identifications for the period 1995 to 2016. These data would qualify the claims of manyfingerprintexaminers regarding their near infallibility, but unfortunately, judges do not seek out such information. We survey the federal and state case law and show how judges typically accept expertcredentials as a proxy for proficiency in lieu of direct proof of proficiency. Indeed, judges often reject parties' attempts to obtain and introduce at trial empirical data on an expert's actual proficiency. We argue that any expert who purports to give falsifiable opinions can be subjected to proficiency testing and that proficiency testing is the only objective means of assessing the accuracy and reliability of experts who rely on subjective judgments to formulate their opinions (so-called "black-box experts"). Judges should use proficiency data to make expert qualification decisions when the data is available, should demand proof of proficiency before qualifying black-box experts, and should admit at trial proficiency data for any qualified expert. We seek to revitalize the standard for qualifying experts: expertise should equal proficiency.
Evidence is the branch of law that regulates how issues may be proved in court. Much of the law of evidence is concerned with the kind of evidence that can be legitimately before the court and taken ...into account in decision making. From civil cases to criminla cases, and from improperply obtained evidence to character evidence, Evidence Essentials guides you through the law of Evidence in Scotland. Summary sections of essential facts help you to revise what you should have learned, and summaries of Essential Cases show how the law of evidence is applied and how it has evolved in Scotland.
In Quest of Justice provides the first full account of the establishment and workings of a new kind of state in Egypt in the modern period. Drawing on groundbreaking research in the Egyptian ...archives, this highly original book shows how the state affected those subject to it and their response. Illustrating how shari'a was actually implemented, how criminal justice functioned, and how scientific-medical knowledges and practices were introduced, Khaled Fahmy offers exciting new interpretations that are neither colonial nor nationalist. Moreover he shows how lower-class Egyptians did not see modern practices that fused medical and legal purposes in new ways as contrary to Islam. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Islam and modernity.
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