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

The Quest For a Core
is a further aspect that needs to be stressed: contextual complexity.
At a multi-disciplinary conference in Boston in 1986, the subject
was Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence. 8 At one stage
there was a series of rather sharp exchanges between proponents of
different theories of probability—all non-lawyers. Professor Richard
Lempert, a distinguished sociologist of law and evidence scholar,
commented that as a lawyer he felt like a Belgian peasant observing
a war between the Great Powers being fought out on his territory.
Later several commentators have developed the analogy to make
the point that in carrying controversy and enquiry from one discipline
into the territory of another it is important to have some local
knowledge of the terrain. 9 To lawyers some of the legal examples
used by non-lawyers in debating issues of probabilities and proof
do not make sense because they ignore procedural and other
"local" factors that lawyers would take into account in actual
cases. This raises a general issue fundamental to inter-disciplinary
work. I have argued elsewhere that psychological research into
eyewitness identification has focused too narrowly on the reliability
of such evidence in court to the exclusion of a wide range of other
issues of both theoretical and practical importance, because psychologists
have uncritically assumed a formalistic, jury-centred and
essentially naive picture of the problem of eyewitness identification.
10 Similarly, some of the standard examples used in debates
about mathematical and non-mathematical probabilities do not
make legal sense and probably do not illustrate the points for which
they are used, because they overlook procedural and policy considerations
which bear on lawyers' perceptions of the problems. 11
Schum is correct in saying that problems of inference and evidence
arise in a wide variety of contexts and that much can be learned
from looking at these problems across disciplines. But in all of these
contexts local knowledge is essential in order to grasp the complex
interactions between logical and contextual factors. That is why
one needs local guides.
Notes
1 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) Chap. 1.
2 Becher, op. cit, at p. 37. A useful survey of the literature on "the quest for order"
in most disciplines is Colin Evans, Language People (1988) Chap. 8.
3 The greater interest of civilians in "legal science" is variously explained: the
longer history of the university study of civil law, a greater concern about scientific
status or about practical influence or more contingent factors. In the Anglo-
American tradition few lawyers subscribe wholeheartedly to a view of law as an
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