The Ethics of Trial Deliberation: Moral Agency in Legal Fact-Finding

Abstract

Section I explicates the building blocks of Ho's legal epistemology: the distinction between the internal and the external point of view, the belief account of legal fact-finding, and the claim that considerations of truth and justice are intertwined in evidence rules. Section II examines the applications of Ho's normative framework to the analysis of the standard of proof, the hearsay rule, and similar facts evidence. Part III subjects Ho's distinction between the internal and external point of view to close analysis in light of contemporary debates over the nature of epistemic justification. Part IV suggests that a turn towards virtue epistemology may provide a good way for extending Ho's approach to evidence law. Part V sheds doubts upon whether Ho's epistemology provides a justification of current evidentiary arrangements and argues that carrying out Ho's internal analysis would, in fact, lead to a substantial revision of those arrangements. The normative arguments of this book lend support to a conception of the law of evidence built around the notion of moral agency which constitutes a valuable normative ideal against which current rules of evidence may be assessed.