Northwestern Events Calendar

Feb
23
2016

Legal Studies GFILS & Faculty Reading Group

When: Tuesday, February 23, 2016
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CT

Where: 620 Lincoln Street, #218 conference room, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Ann Kelchner   (847) 467-2207

Group: Center for Legal Studies

Category: Academic

Description:

The Legal Studies GFILS & Faculty reading group for this quarter will be meeting on Tuesday, February 23rd at 5pm, in the 2nd floor conference room (#218), 620 Lincoln Street.

The book we’ll be discussing is Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Law in Context) by Susan Haack.

Is truth in the law just plain truth - or something sui generis? Is a trial a search for truth? Do adversarial procedures and exclusionary rules of evidence enable, or impede, the accurate determination of factual issues? Can degrees of proof be identified with mathematical probabilities? What role can statistical evidence properly play? How can courts best handle the scientific testimony on which cases sometimes turn? How are they to distinguish reliable scientific testimony from unreliable hokum? The dozen interdisciplinary essays collected here explore a whole nexus of such questions about science, proof, and truth in the law. With her characteristic clarity and verve, in these essays Haack brings her original and distinctive work in theory of knowledge and philosophy of science to bear on real-life legal issues. She includes detailed analyses of a wide variety of cases and lucid summaries of relevant scientific work, of the many roles of the scientific peer-review system, and of relevant legal developments.

A limited number of books are available to GFILS and ABF doctoral fellows. To check if there are available copies, please contact Ann at legalstudies@northwestern.edu. Please consider taking the book as a commitment to come to the reading group.

Dinner will be provided the night of the reading group!
Please feel free to forward this to faculty and graduate students who are interested in Legal Studies.

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