Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

The Quest For a Core
For example, when we have masses of information we do not know
how to deal with it:
"Our current methods for gathering, storing, retrieving, and transmitting
information far exceed, in number and effectiveness, our methods for
putting this information to inferential use in the drawing of conclusions
from it." 1
Schum gives credit to John Henry Wigmore, the American legal
scholar, for making major strides in filling this "methodological
gap" by devising a method for marshalling and structuring a mixed
mass of evidence within a single argument. In so doing, Wigmore
anticipated modern developments in respect of influence diagrams
and fuzzy logic. 2
It is pleasing to hear a distinguished outsider making such claims
for the relevance of one's subject to other disciplines. On the whole
I agree with Schum's thesis, but I would enter a few caveats. First,
he is perhaps too generous in giving credit to the contributions of
evidence scholarship rather than to the practical context of law.
As Schum himself observes, the courts have been a clearing-house
for almost every variety of evidence and for expert witnesses from
many fields. 3 In dealing with "mixed masses" of different kinds of
evidence from varied sources, courts and lawyers have regularly
had to ask questions about the credibility, reliability and authenticity
of the sources and how the evidence relates to the issues in
dispute, especially in respect of relevance and weight. Nearly all
disputed cases involve problems of proof which typically have to
be tackled dialectically by interested, often skilled, adversaries.
Because some cases involve a great quantity of evidence, practising
lawyers have had to develop methods of analysing and marshalling
complex masses of data and presenting them in a clear and orderly
fashion. 4 Until recently most disciplines have tended to oversimplify
by underestimating the complexity of most inferential
tasks. If law has been less prone to fall into this trap, it is largely
because its raw materials, real life cases, force at least some of
these complexities to the surface in the crucible of adversarial
argument.
However, the record of evidence scholarship is rather uneven.
During the past century Anglo-American legal scholarship has
focused almost entirely on the Law of Evidence, especially the artificial
rules of admissibility. With a few notable exceptions, it has
until recently neglected the wider aspects of evidence and proof.
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