Burden Of Persuasion Research Articles

Building Exchange Relationships: Perceptions of Sales Representatives' Performance

Purchasing and sales professionals spend considerable portions of the work week interacting. Usually the burden of persuasion is faced by the seller and a very important objective of any sales call is an improvement in the buyer-seller relationship. This research examined the views of a sample of 173 purchasing executives and 193 manufacturers' representatives concerning sellers' performance on a number of variables related to exchange relationships. Analysis indicated that buyers held significantly more modest views of the performance of sales representatives than did members of the business-to-business sales force.

Science and persuasion: Environmental disease in U.S. courts

The U.S. system for determining liability for environmental disease requires plaintiffs to demonstrate that the defendant was the legal cause of their illnesses. The determination of cause takes place in an adversary setting. Both sides in the dispute present evidence about causation to a lay judge or jury, who is responsible for deciding whether the defendant is legally responsible. In injury cases this generally means providing evidence of a specific, concrete event or condition that gave rise to the plaintiff's harm. Environmental disease usually presents a very different picture, one in which there is considerable uncertainty about the relationship between exposure to toxic substances and the plaintiff's disease. Scientific evidence about this uncertain link is often an essential part of the case. The reliance on scientific evidence appears to present almost insurmountable problems of proof of causation to the plaintiff. The law requires the plaintiff to demonstrate that, without the defendant's action, the harm would not have occurred. This strict requirement appears incompatible with the substantial scientific uncertainty about the cause of many environmental diseases. A second attribute of legal causation is that it is based on common experience, and is easily understood by lay citizens who are likely to be the final arbiters of causation. Scientific explanations of environmental disease causation, on the other hand, may not draw on common experience and may not have the intuitive appeal necessary to convince a lay decision-maker. Because scientific evidence of causation is difficult for a lay judge or jury to understand, and because of the adversary use of experts with very different opinions about causation, it might be expected that plaintiffs would have a great deal of difficulty demonstrating causation in environmental liability cases. However, the U.S. legal system appears to have accommodated to the plaintiff's difficulty in meeting the formal burden of persuasion. The courts allow juries considerable leeway in using their own experience and beliefs to determine causation, as long as there is some scientific evidence to support the plaintiff's contention. The U.S. environmental disease liability system has been criticized by some for plaintiffs' difficulty in proving causation and by others because plaintiffs can win cases without evidence that would be convincing to a scientist. This has led to suggestions for reform, including: (1) attempts to alter rules governing the introduction of scientific evidence, (2) altering the burden of persuasion to make the legal definition of cause more consistent with the inherent scientific uncertainty in these cases, (3) the use of formal presumptions to aid in establishing legal causation, and (4) replacing or supplementing the existing environmental disease liability system with an administrative compensation system. Those proposing reforms do not always appear to recognize that there is already considerable flexibility in the existing system.

The AIDS Dilemma: Recent Court Decisions Place a Burden of Persuasion on Public Schools

School officials increasingly are becoming concerned about Ac quired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Principals are reminded that public safety concerns are likely to be subject to judicial scrutiny. Here's a review of recent court decisions that will affect schools.

Retaining a Modified Insanity Defense

The insanity defense must be retained because it is fundamentally just. Some mentally disordered defendants are so irrational at the time of their offenses that they lack the basic preconditions of moral responsibility, and therefore they must be excused. Retaining the insanity defense will not compromise public safety, nor will abolishing it lead to the remedying of associated social problems such as the substandard mental health care in jails and prisons. Nevertheless, there are real problems with the administration of the defense that must be addressed. The substantive tests must be revised, the burden of persuasion should be put on the defendant, the role of experts should be limited, and post-acquittal procedures must be made more rational. Impatience with the practical problems, which can be ameliorated by sensible reforms, should not cause society to abandon a basically fair doctrine.

Rationality and Accuracy in the Criminal Process: A Discordant Note on the Harmonizing of the Justices' Views on Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases

There is presently ongoing an extensive debate concerning the scope and implications of the constitutional requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt in criminal cases. In a remarkably short period of time the debate has generated a literature sufficiently vast so that complete citation is precluded simply for lack of space.1 Much more importantly, a review of randomly selected criminal cases indicates that ambiguity concerning the implications of the requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt may be generating as much litigation as any other constellation of issues in the criminal process. Indeed, these two phenomena are intimately related. One of the attractions of this area for scholars is precisely the ambiguity that generates litigation. The primary source of the ambiguity is by now an oft-told tale in no need of elaboration here. In brief, the ambiguity is the direct result of the United States Supreme Court having constitutionalized the requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt without providing any but the most trivial explicit criteria for its application.2 The result has been

Statistical Significance and the Burden of Persuasion

In most endeavors concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, quantitative information is welcomed. In law, however, it appears sometimes that scientific or numerical evidence makes cases harder, not easier. Nevertheless, there are many cases and administrative proceedings, in such areas as environmental law, food and drug regulation, and civil rights, in which statistical data obtained by observation or experiment are readily accepted as assisting in the proper resolution of disputed issues of fact.' When courts or administrators confront scientific and statistical evidence in these proceedings, they are not always certain of how to weigh the evidence or whether they should, or must, rely on the standards for proof that scientists apply in evaluating statistical hypotheses. Two decisions of the Supreme Court illustrate this uncertainty. In Castaneda zv Partida, 2 a grand jury discrimination case, the Court, acting as its own statistician, computed a statistic known as the deviation.3 The Court found this computation highly probative of discrimination in light of the general rule that if the difference between the expected value and the observed number is greater than two or three standard deviations, the hypothesis that the jury drawing was random would be suspect to a social scientist.4 One would not have thought that this reference, in a single footnote, to a standard of proof popular among social scientists would be read as commanding that the same standard be determinative when evaluating statistical evidence in court. Yet, in Hazelwood School District v. United States,5 an employment discrimination case decided the same year, the Court dropped the qualifying language about social science and noted that, under the precise methodology delineated in Castaneda, a disparity of slightly less than two standard deviations was not suspect.6 In the wake of these opinions,

The Restoration of In re Winship: A Comment on Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases after Patterson v. New York

The Restoration of In re Winship: A Comment on Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases after Patterson v. New York

The Thumb on the Scales of Justice: Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases

The Thumb on the Scales of Justice: Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases

Buzynski v. Oliver: Allocation of the Burden of Persuasion for the Insanity Defense

Buzynski v. Oliver: Allocation of the Burden of Persuasion for the Insanity Defense

Taxation: Burden of Persuasion in Tax Collection Cases

Taxation: Burden of Persuasion in Tax Collection Cases

Burden of Production of Evidence: A Function of a Burden of Persuasion

Burden of Production of Evidence: A Function of a Burden of Persuasion