TILLERS ON EVIDENCE
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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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Wednesday, January 19, 2005
The 72-witness rule

James Franklin reports (at pp. 13-14 in his book The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (2001)) that the False Decretals, a mish-mash of things compiled ca. 850 A.D., contain a passage asserting that a "bishop should not be condemned except with seventy-two witnesses." About this and some similar rules for defendants of lesser stature Franklin writes:

It is the world's first quantitative theory of probability. Which shows why being quantitative about probability is not necessarily a good thing.

Posted by Peter Tillers at 9:17 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).