Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian

Abstract

Evidence, like clue or proof is a crucial word for the historian and the judge. This affinity implies convergences, and divergences as well, which have been recognized for a long time. Some recent developments in the historian's work shed new light on this old topic.' In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of the literary genre we call "history," the relationship between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an independent intellectual activity at the intersection of med-