(Program to be published in Journal of Law and Policy)
It has now been forty years since Michael Finkelstein and William Fairley debated Laurence Tribe in the pages of the Harvard Law Review over the use of statistical evidence in legal proceedings. With the recent growth of quantitative methods in the legal academy, and with the popularity of computationally intensive methods in areas like on-line retailing, the time is ripe to revisit the question of the place of statistics in the law.
This panel will look at the future of statistical evidence from a variety of angles. It will examine the promise of statistics in generating more rigorous inferences, the philosophical objections to this promise, and how statistics have played out in real courtroom battles.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.