The Law's Flaws by Larry Laudan

The Law's Flaws by Larry Laudan

This is a book about the law's failure as a system of empirical inquiry. While the US Supreme Court repeatedly says that the aim of a trial is to find out the truth about a crime, there is abundant evidence that many of the rules of evidence and legal procedure are not truth-conducive. Quite the contrary; many are truth-thwarting. Relevant evidence of defendant's guilt is often excluded; reasonable inferences from the available evidence are likewise often excluded. When a defendant elects not to testify, jurors are told to draw no inculpatory inferences from the former's refusal to be questioned. If evidence of prior crimes committed by the defendant is admitted (and often it is excluded), jurors are strictly told to use them only for deciding whether the defendant lied during his testimony and not as evidence of his guilt.

Making matters worse, the most important evidence rule of all (saying that defendant can be convicted only if there are no reasonable doubts about his guilt) is monumentally vague; and judges are under firm instruction to decline jurors' frequent requests to explain what a 'reasonable doubt' is.

Lastly, this book examines the fact that American courts collect little information about how often they convict the innocent and no information about how often they acquit the guilty. This is tragic because ignorance of the error rates in trials and in plea bargains means that citizens have no grounds for confidence in the judicial system; such a condition of non-transparency should be unacceptable in a democracy. Reform is urgent and this book sketches some of the necessary changes.

Laudan, Larry: - Larry Laudan is Principal Investigator at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and president-elect of the Peirce Society. He is the author of many books, most recently Beyond Positisms and Relativism, and The Book of Risks.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781848901995
ISBN 10	1848901992
Title	The Law's Flaws
Author	Larry Laudan
Series	Law And Society
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	College Publications
Year published	2016-08-22
Number of pages	228
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.