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The Meta-Epistemology of Criminal Law - William Cullerne Bown

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Location:

Elder Room
Old College
South Bridge
EH8 9YL

Date/time

Wed 23 October 2019
15:00-17:00

Join us for the inaugural event of the new Criminal Law Discussion Group.

This event is free and open to all, and tea/coffee and biscuits will be served. The seminar will feature a presentation on the meta-epistemology of criminal law by William Cullerne Bown, an independent legal scholar who looks at the law with quantitative eyes. This talk is based on three articles about the jurisprudence of the criminal justice system that have recently been published in the International Journal of Evidence & Proof.

About the event

In this talk I will take seriously outcomes, the tight epistemic question of whether the system convicts the guilty and acquits the innocent. The basic idea is to think of the criminal justice system as a classifier (guilty or not) and to draw a sharp distinction between the day-to-day policies (its epistemology) and the principles according to which those policies are developed (the meta-epistemology). This gets criminal law to roughly the stage medicine reached in the 1930s when it adopted the indicators of sensitivity and specificity for assessing the accuracy of diagnostic tests.

This leaves us with a puzzle concerning the apparently natural idea of better outcomes. 

It turns out that it is not possible, as a scientist or economist would like, to discover an answer to which meta-epistemology is best. However, by developing a suitable convention, we can make it possible for society to consider its options and make a choice of the meta-epistemology it prefers, a kind of goal that is more familiar in political philosophy than jurisprudence.

One argument in favour of this approach is political, that through measurement we can achieve a more democratic form of law. Another is that it is more just. For this, I return to Justinian to look for a conception of justice rooted in outcomes. By considering the distribution of harms and benefits and drawing on sortition and John Rawls I conclude that it is to be found in a criminal justice system that faithfully reflects a democratically chosen meta-epistemology.

 

This is not a pre-read event so please feel free to just turn up on the day.

For more information please contact - crimlawdg@ed.ac.uk 

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