Group Deliberative Virtues and Legal Epistemology

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Collective agents play a critical role in the legal determination of facts. The jury continues to be the primary fact-finding institution in many legal cultures, and multi-member courts are also entrusted, in some legal systems, with the task of determining the facts at trial. Notwithstanding the relevance of group decision-making in evidential reasoning in law, legal epistemology for the most part embraces a highly individualistic perspective. A focus on the individual processes of legal decision-making is also a characteristic of attempts to address problems of legal epistemology by using the virtue theory framework. In this chapter, my aim is to contribute to the study of the social dimensions of deliberation about factual issues in law. More specifically, I will examine the relevance of group deliberative virtues, i.e., the character traits that enable sound group deliberation, to the epistemology of legal proof.