Lewis Ross (London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - London School of Economics) has posted The Foundations of Criminal Law Epistemology (Forthcoming in ERGO, https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology and suggest a way to vindicate it.
And from the paper:
The core commitment of criminal law epistemology is ‘legal doxasticism’. This is the idea that guilty verdicts are appropriate only if a full belief in guilt would be rational, given the admissible evidence. I have argued that the very nature of punishment— following an institutional inquiry into moral accountability—requires asking whether we believe that the subject is culpable for their wrongdoing. Otherwise, we simply treat those being judged like a vector of risk, and criminal justice ceases to be a distinctive institution. Even if corporate bodies like courts can diverge from individuals in how they utilise certain concepts, it is nevertheless a basic condition of legitimacy for criminal courts that their judgements (aim to) conform to the judgements that a reasonable member of society would make if they considered the case for themselves. This does not mean that all aspects of criminal law epistemology are beyond reproach. For example, some of the more technical examples of the genre may diverge too far from folk notions of rational belief. But the basic project, so I have claimed, is well- motivated.
Very interesting. This paper covers a lot of ground. Highly recommended.
