•  228
    The Philosophy of Legal Proof
    Cambridge University Press. 2024.
    Criminal courts make decisions that can remove the liberty and even life of those accused. Civil trials can cause the bankruptcy of companies employing thousands of people, asylum seekers being deported, or children being placed into state care. Selecting the right standards when deciding legal cases is of utmost importance in giving those affected a fair deal. This Element is an introduction to the philosophy of legal proof. It is organised around five questions. First, it introduces the standa…Read more
  •  187
    Jury Reform and Live Deliberation Research
    Amicus Curiae 5 (1): 64-70. 2023.
    Researchers face perennial difficulties in studying live jury deliberation. As a result, the academic community struggles to reach a consensus on key matters of legal reform concerning jury trials. The hurdles faced by empirical jury researchers are often legal or institutional. This note argues that the legal and institutional barriers preventing live deliberation research should be removed and discusses two forms that live deliberation research could take.
  •  533
    Jury science is fraught with difficulty. Since legal and institutional hurdles render it all but impossible to study live criminal jury deliberation, researchers make use of various indirect methods to evaluate jury performance. But each of these methods are open to methodological criticism and, strikingly, some of the highest-profile jury research programmes in recent years have reached opposing conclusions. Uncertainty about jury performance is an obstacle for legal reform—ongoing debates abou…Read more
  •  390
    Criminal Proof: Fixed or Flexible?
    Philosophical Quarterly (4): 1-23. 2023.
    Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, inst…Read more
  •  184
    Introduction and Discussion of a Special Issue in philosophy of law "Philosophical Dimensions of the Trial"
  •  635
    Profiling, Neutrality, and Social Equality
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4): 808-824. 2022.
    I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this e…Read more
  •  355
    Criminal Proof: Fixed or Flexible?
    The Philosophical Quarterly. 2023.
    Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, inst…Read more
  •  656
    The Curious Case of the Jury-shaped Hole: A Plea for Real Jury Research
    International Journal of Evidence and Proof. forthcoming.
    Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that re…Read more
  •  23
    Charles Larmore, What is Political Philosophy?
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 18 (6): 659-662. 2021.
  •  811
    The Foundations of Criminal Law Epistemology
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    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 episte…Read more
  •  42
    What should we do about low conviction rates for sexual offences? Much of the discussion focuses on the problem of prosecution: i.e. too few accusations of sexual assault make their way to court. Here, I want to consider the problem from a different angle—namely, what should we do if prosecution rates rise, but conviction rates do not? After all, prosecutions are not an end in themselves. The problem is that too few people who are guilty of sexual assault are being punished. So, what steps, if a…Read more
  •  869
    Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited
    Philosophical Issues 31 (1): 315-333. 2021.
    This paper defends the heretical view that, at least in some cases, we ought to assign legal liability based on purely statistical evidence. The argument draws on prominent civil law litigation concerning pharmaceutical negligence and asbestos-poisoning. The overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls that result from supposing that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.
  •  764
    The Truth About Better Understanding?
    Erkenntnis 88 (2): 747-770. 2021.
    The notion of understanding occupies an increasingly prominent place in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. A central and ongoing debate about the nature of understanding is how it relates to the truth. In a series of influential contributions, Catherine Elgin has used a variety of familiar motivations for antirealism in philosophy of science to defend a non- factive theory of understanding. Key to her position are: (i) the fact that false theories can contribute …Read more
  •  1335
    Rehabilitating Statistical Evidence
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 3-23. 2019.
    Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evi…Read more
  •  1445
    Recent work on the proof paradox
    Philosophy Compass 15 (6). 2020.
    Recent years have seen fresh impetus brought to debates about the proper role of statistical evidence in the law. Recent work largely centres on a set of puzzles known as the ‘proof paradox’. While these puzzles may initially seem academic, they have important ramifications for the law: raising key conceptual questions about legal proof, and practical questions about DNA evidence. This article introduces the proof paradox, why we should care about it, and new work attempting to resolve it.
  •  621
    Legal proof and statistical conjunctions
    Philosophical Studies 178 (6): 2021-2041. 2020.
    A question, long discussed by legal scholars, has recently provoked a considerable amount of philosophical attention: ‘Is it ever appropriate to base a legal verdict on statistical evidence alone?’ Many philosophers who have considered this question reject legal reliance on bare statistics, even when the odds of error are extremely low. This paper develops a puzzle for the dominant theories concerning why we should eschew bare statistics. Namely, there seem to be compelling scenarios in wh…Read more
  •  733
    How Intellectual Communities Progress
    Episteme (4): 738-756. 2021.
    Recent work takes both philosophical and scientific progress to consist in acquiring factive epistemic states such as knowledge. However, much of this work leaves unclear what entity is the subject of these epistemic states. Furthermore, by focusing only on states like knowledge, we overlook progress in intermediate cases between ignorance and knowledge—for example, many now celebrated theories were initially so controversial that they were not known. This paper develops an improved framework f…Read more
  •  1047
    Is Understanding Reducible?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (2): 117-135. 2020.
    Despite playing an important role in epistemology, philosophy of science, and more recently in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the nature of understanding is still much contested. One attractive framework attempts to reduce understanding to other familiar epistemic states. This paper explores and develops a methodology for testing such reductionist theories before offering a counterexample to a recently defended variant on which understanding reduces to what an agent knows.
  •  1038
    The virtue of curiosity
    Episteme 17 (1): 105-120. 2020.
    ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists…Read more
  •  1030
    Philosophical expertise under the microscope
    Synthese 197 (3): 1077-1098. 2020.
    Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussi…Read more