Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...) and suggest a way to vindicate it. (shrink)

I examine how deferred-prosecution agreements employed against suspected corporate criminality amount to a form of social engineering that infringes the presumption. I begin with a broad understanding of the presumption itself. Then I offer a brief description of how these agreements function. Finally I address some of the normative issues that must be confronted if legal philosophers who hold retributivist views on punishment and sentencing hope to assess this device. My judgment tends to be favorable. More importantly, I caution against (...) the facile assumption that any means to infringe the presumption is necessarily an illegitimate part of penal practice. (shrink)

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Philosophy of law was until recently dominated by abstract investigation into the nature of law, a pursuit known as ‘general jurisprudence’. In this way, it resembled a branch of metaphysics or mid-twentieth century philosophy of mind, seeking to uncover the essential properties (...) of a general and multiply realizable phenomenon. Today, philosophers study law with a sharper focus, and with a more specialized lens – that of ethicists, for example, or epistemologists, or philosophers of action.That is not to say there has been a drop in groundbreaking work in general jurisprudence (see, for... (shrink)

Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)