Legal Studies 297V - ST- Weighing the Evidence

What are the likely effects of proposed social policies? Are publicly funded programs helping the intended beneficiaries? Should a new technology be considered a health risk? How can one manage to sensibly synthesize multiple strands of evidence of criminal wrongdoing, discrimination, or liability to reach a sound judgment? Human intuition is easily led astray when tasked with judging probabilistic and causal arguments at the heart of these and other such questions. It takes mental training to better avoid the pitfalls to careful reasoning under uncertainty. We consider different ways that philosophers, scientists, and statisticians have sought to interpret probability and causation, the practical techniques that have emerged, and how they may be applied to certain problems in public policy and law. Grappling with a number of interesting fallacies, puzzles, and paradoxes along the way, students will deepen their ability to critically examine competing claims about data, analyze and interpret evidence, and identify areas of genuine ambiguity.