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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, April 19, 2005
New Tool for the Investigation of Forensic Fact Investigation and Other Dynamic Legal Processes

If you are interested in multi-entity Bayesian networks [MEBNs] and multi-entity decision graphs [MEDGs] but would prefer to do without quantum theory and the possibility of intelligent & conscious natural processes, you should revisit Kathryn Blackmond Laskey's web page for papers and publications that deal only with applications of MEBNs and MEDGs. See Kathryn Laskey's Papers and Publications The paper titles are self-explanatory. Look close to the top of the web page. Laskey's papers seem to deal with military applications of MEBNs, but I have reason to think that MEDGs in particular would be a powerful tool for the study of forensic fact investigation, which is a dynamic process that involves probabilities, weighting of preferences, interactions among multiple agents, and all that. (But someone with better math skills than I have must undertake this research project. Is there a doctoral candidate or a post-doc out there in cyberspace who wants to try his or her hand at a very difficult but important problem?)

Posted by Peter Tillers at 3:42 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).