Analysing the new evidence scholarship: Towards a new conception of the law of evidence

Abstract

In the past thirty years evidence scholarship in the United States has been considerably revitalized by a shift of interest away from the rules of evidence towards the process of proof and the way inferences should be drawn from a mass of evidence.' As a result important lines of communication have been opened up between evidence scholars and specialists in the fields of probability and statistics which have been illustrated by impressively staged international conferences and seminars on probability and inference in the law of evidence.2 These have provided the forum for contested claims about the merits of different theories of probability and inference. Two schools of inferential direction, the Pascal/Bayes school of probability and uncertainty and the Baconian/Cohen school of inductive probability, have attracted particular attention but a number of others have come to the fore.3 This 'new' evidence scholarship has spread throughout the common law world and into civil law countries which were not considered to have a law of evidence.4 But it has been largely ignored by evidence scholars in the United Kingdom, despite the fact that a British philosopher, Jonathan Cohen, has played a leading role in it by advocating his own particular Baconian theory of