Title: Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of Knowledge
Abstract:PROBLEMA bus causes harm.In the first scenario, an eyewitness recognizes the bus as belonging to the Blue Bus Company.The witness, however, is imperfectly reliable; let us say that she is roughly 70 p...PROBLEMA bus causes harm.In the first scenario, an eyewitness recognizes the bus as belonging to the Blue Bus Company.The witness, however, is imperfectly reliable; let us say that she is roughly 70 percent reliable in matters such as this one.The law has no qualms about accepting the eyewitness testimony as evidence and indeed basing a positive finding that the bus was a Blue Bus bus (and perhaps also that the Blue Bus Company is liable) on the testimony.In the second scenario, there is no eyewitness, but we have uncontested data regarding the distribution of buses in the relevant area; in particular, the Blue Bus Company owns roughly 70 percent of the buses there.Here, though, the law typically will not be willing to base a positive finding of fact-and certainly not liability-on just this kind of evidence, sometimes called statistical evidence.Indeed, in most jurisdictions it is not even clear that such evidence would be considered admissible or relevant.And regardless of the reasons why (more on this shortly), it is an 1 overwhelmingly common and strong intuition among practitioners and scholars alike that there is something suspicious about the second scenario, that there is some sense in which the market-share evidence is inferior to the eyewitness testimony.But of course, the caseRead More