This book explores the nature of factual inference in adjudication. The book should be useful to students of law in Continental Europe as well as to students of Anglo-American law. While a good many countries do not use the sorts of rules of evidence found in the Anglo-American legal tradition, their procedural systems nevertheless frequently use a variety of rules and principles to regulate and structure the acquisition, presentation, and evalu ation of evidence. In this sense, almost all legal systems have a law of proof. This book should also be useful to scholars in fields other than law. While the papers focus on inference in adjudication, they deal with a wide variety of issues that are important in disciplines such as the philosophy of science, statistics, and psychology. For example, there is extensive discussion of the role of generalizations and hypotheses in inference and of the significance of the fact that the actors who evaluate data also in some sense constitute the data that they evaluate. Furthermore, explanations of the manner in which some legal systems structure fact-finding processes may highlight features of inferential processes that have yet to be adequately tackled by scholars in fields other than law."

Fact finding in judicial proceedings is a dynamic process. This collection of papers considers whether computational methods or other formal logical methods developed in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and probability theory can facilitate the study and management of dynamic evidentiary and inferential processes in litigation. The papers gathered here have several epicenters, including (i) the dynamics of judicial proof, (ii) the relationship between artificial intelligence or formal analysis and "common sense," (iii) the logic of factual inference, including (a) the relationship between causality and inference and (b) the relationship between language and factual inference, (iv) the logic of discovery, including the role of abduction and serendipity in the process of investigation and proof of factual matters, and (v) the relationship between decision and inference.

This book explores the nature of factual inference in adjudication. The book should be useful to students of law in Continental Europe as well as to students of Anglo-American law. While a good many countries do not use the sorts of rules of evidence found in the Anglo-American legal tradition, their procedural systems nevertheless frequently use a variety of rules and principles to regulate and structure the acquisition, presentation, and evalu ation of evidence. In this sense, almost all legal systems have a law of proof. This book should also be useful to scholars in fields other than law. While the papers focus on inference in adjudication, they deal with a wide variety of issues that are important in disciplines such as the philosophy of science, statistics, and psychology. For example, there is extensive discussion of the role of generalizations and hypotheses in inference and of the significance of the fact that the actors who evaluate data also in some sense constitute the data that they evaluate. Furthermore, explanations of the manner in which some legal systems structure fact-finding processes may highlight features of inferential processes that have yet to be adequately tackled by scholars in fields other than law."

Fact finding in judicial proceedings is a dynamic process. This collection of papers considers whether computational methods or other formal logical methods developed in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and probability theory can facilitate the study and management of dynamic evidentiary and inferential processes in litigation. The papers gathered here have several epicenters, including (i) the dynamics of judicial proof, (ii) the relationship between artificial intelligence or formal analysis and "common sense," (iii) the logic of factual inference, including (a) the relationship between causality and inference and (b) the relationship between language and factual inference, (iv) the logic of discovery, including the role of abduction and serendipity in the process of investigation and proof of factual matters, and (v) the relationship between decision and inference.