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Professor Peter Tillers of Cardozo Law School in New York blogs for JURIST on the latest evidence issues...
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Monday, June 28, 2004
Intellectual Orthodoxy and Heresy in the University

At one university incoming undergraduate students are invited or expected to take part in discussions about the relationship between consumption and poverty. The tone of the invitation issued to the incoming students makes it fairly clear (to me) that the students who participate in these discussions will be led to question the uprightness of modern American consumerist society.

I am all in favor of ethical analysis in the university. But I'm much less in favor of hortatory ethical instruction in the university. I am also opposed to prejudging answers to (ostensible) questions that do not have a self-evident answers.

Value-free analysis of political, social, legal, ethical, and moral questions may well be impossible. But doesn't it still make sense to try to create an academic atmosphere that encourages free inquiry, an atmosphere that does not frown on heretical conclusions?
Posted by Peter Tillers at 1:18 PM
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Professor Peter Tillers

"I have practiced a little bit of law -- I worked as a litigator, once in California and once in Texas -- but for most of my professional life I have studied and taught law.

In the early part of my academic career I dabbled in philosophy, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. But as I matured, I came to my senses. This explains why during the last 15 years I have devoted much more attention to evidence, inference, and proof in litigation than to German Idealism and similar matters. However, I did not succeed in completely obliterating the influence of philosophy and epistemology on my thinking. Thus, in my effort to understand and explain the process of proof in litigation, I have devoted a great deal of attention to matters such as probability theory and theories of evidence, inference, induction, and proof.

Peter Tillers is Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University. He revised volumes 1 &1A of Wigmore on Evidence (1983) and is the author of Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence (1988; with E. Green).