Book Review

 Book Review

By- Vijay Kumar Katiyar

Addl. District & Sessions Judge

Basti Uttar Pradesh, India

Title of the book                                            Author of the book

             ‘The Proof’                                                    Frederick Schauer

                                                          Publisher

                                              Harvard University Press

                                                     London, England

Publishing Year

2022

 

About the author: -

The author is working right now as a professor of Law at the University of Virginia and author of Free speech; A philosophical Enquiry; Playing by the Rules; Profiles; Probabilities and Stereotypes; Thinking like a Lawyer and The Force of Law. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the founding editor of the journal Legal Theory.

Compelling Factors: -

         Recent developments give new urgency to questions about evidence. The rise of the internet, the widespread use of social media, the Covid-19 pandemic, the accelerating concern about climate change, the 2020 US presidential election, the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the Trump Administration generally are the obvious example of the contemporary events in which controversies about facts and the evidence offered to prove them have taken center stage.

The non-traditional notion about evidence: -

         More and more, the use and misuse of evidence has a prominence that would surprise anyone who thinks of evidence as a collection of often-silly lawyers’ rules governing the conduct of trials. But the evidence is not only about trials and not only about law. It is about science it is about history; it is about psychology’ and it is above all, about human rationality.

          No one book can hope to deal with the subject of evidence in its full depth and complexity. But we cannot ignore the increasing importance of questions of evidence in public policy and personal decision-making.

Chapter-wise contents: -

         The entire book is divided into 13 chapters. Chapter-1 is related to facts and evidence and said that however important it is to follow the facts, it is also to recognize that science and the facts can only take us so far. Doing the right thing matters, but getting facts right is the first step.

          Chapter-1 also talks about the idea of evidence and said that evidence is what provides the justification or warrant as philosophers are prone to put it for believing that something is true or false. Pieces of evidence are facts, but they are the facts that lead us to the conclusion that the other facts do or do not exist.

          Chapters-2, 3 & 4 of this book talk about the concept of evidence itself. Chapters- 5, 6, 7 & 8 talk about the testimony in the broad sense while chapters 9, 10 & 11 deal with the world of experts and expertise, concentrating on the ways in which expertise can be used and evaluated. Chapters 12 and 13 deal with topics not so neatly grouped together but connected with what we can learn from contemporary research in cognitive and social psychology. 

Takeaway from this book: -

1.    Horses not Zebra: -

The Horses not Zebra for evidence is that evidence is about inference, and inference is about probability it denotes rational thinking with a person of common prudence while investigating or making a trial of any offence. Recognizing and pursuing the unusual and unexpected is indeed valuable for discovery, creativity, and innovation but it is also often valuable to expect the expected to recognize the probabilities are important, and to rely on them. Absent further information horses, not zebras are the winning bet.

2.    Bayesian approach: -

Under a Bayesian approach, the test of whether some fact is evidence of some other fact, or of some conclusion, is incremental, if the fact increases the likelihood of some conclusion above what it would be without that fact, then the fact is evidence for the conclusion. And if a fact decreases the likelihood of some conclusion, then it is evidence against the conclusion. But if the fact neither increases nor decreases what we believed before—prior probability- then the fact is simply not evidence at all or at least not evidence for or against the conclusion in question although it might be evidence for or against some other conclusion.

Limitations of this book: -

I found points of disagreement. Mr. Schauer takes a more favorable view of the use of statistical evidence in court proceedings than I do. The debate pertains mainly to civil cases in which the plaintiff only has to prove that the “preponderance of the evidence” supports his case (a lower burden than the beyond-a-reasonable doubt standard required in criminal cases). In essence, prove the defendant is 51% likely to be guilty, and you win. But the subject of statistics is relevant in criminal law, too. We know, Mr. Schauer notes, that the vast majority of married women killed in their homes were murdered by their husbands. Is that statistical likelihood admissible as evidence in a murder trial? 

The other very important criticism is that American authors are so clever because finance and economy are inserted in the blood of each and every American because the wider approach regarding evidence and proof is already described by the classical Indian book of Nyaya shastra in this book the proof of the fact can be made either by the result of the incidence or by the cause of the incidence. Dayanand Saraswati in his book Satyarthprakash also enunciated the doctrine of evidence and proof. It means that the notion of this book is not new in my opinion. My rating of the book is four stars.

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