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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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Tuesday, December 14, 2004
A Great Leap Forward

"Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced today that it had entered into agreements with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web." John Markoff & Edward Wyatt, Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database, New York Times (online), Dec. 14, 2004.

I propose that Google be designated an eleemosynary institution and that Congress mandate that donations to Google be made tax-deductible.

This is truly a great leap forward. Think of all the people in remote corners of the world -- in Columbus, Ohio, for example -- who will be able to access Stanford University's library materials -- and Stanford's reputation, by reason of its generosity, will soon outpace Harvard's. (Harvard is making only 40,000 volumes available online -- "initially." [Harvard, I suppose, is hedging its bets.])
Posted by Peter Tillers at 1:44 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).