Modeling Criminal Law

Abstract

I am delighted to participate in the celebration of this major new work. I was especially delighted because the first and last article that I have published dealing directly with either the substantive criminal law or the philosophy of punishment was the very first article I ever published.1 Since that time, my scholarship went in the direction of epistemology, rationality, formal v. informal decision tools, regulating complex systems, and so on. When I received this invitation, I exalted over the fact that those who do such heavy jurisprudential lifting finally had come to realize the significance of paying attention to the accuracy and utility of their models, the manner in which they handled informational demands, the potential and limits of cognition all the things in short that interest me. And so I began reading in great anticipation of that section of the book dealing with such issues, and imagine my delight when on page 322 of a 324-page tome, I found it! There was a paragraph with its own subsection number and title: "Burdens of Proof and Evidentiary Rules." And not just its own title, but an ITALICIZED title at that. Some might think a single paragraph in a 324-page book might suggest a slighting of the topic, but I immediately saw to the contrary. Our authors whom we are celebrating had seen that, like the entire universe can be seen in a flower, so too the entire legal universe can be seen in a single paragraph dealing with evidentiary matters; and