Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

SCOTUS announced its decision in the Colorado gay wedding cake case yesterday (4 June). In brief, the Court side-stepped the main substantive issue (is baking a wedding cake a form of expression under the First Amendment?) and decided the case … Continue reading →

As we mentioned in a previous post (part 4 of our review of Allen and Pardo’s relative plausibility paper), “plausibility”, however defined, is just another word for “probability.” Yet, this notion of plausibility, though simple and intuitive, is a crude … Continue reading →

We have been reviewing Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s excellent paper on “relative plausibility,” and as we mentioned in our previous post, we commend their relative plausibility theory of juridical proof for its simplicity. In brief, their theory is that … Continue reading →

In our previous post, we restated Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s “relative plausibility” theory of legal proof (or what Allen and Pardo also call the “explanatory account” of evidence), an approach meant to displace probabilistic or mathematical theories of legal … Continue reading →

As we mentioned in a previous post, law professors Ron Allen and Mike Pardo summarize and critique probabilistic theories of evidence on pp. 7-12 of their most recent paper “Relative plausibility and its critics.” (Hold on: “critique” is too polite. … Continue reading →

CNN, the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage, went on the air on this day in 1980. At the time, CNN’s format was a radical innovation. Today, with the rise of the Internet, CNN–and cable TV generally–seem so antiquated …

We recently discovered Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s new paper on “Relative plausibility and its critics” via Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog. Because of our fascination with all things Bayesian and with the role of probability theory in legal trials, … Continue reading →

In addition to Frank Valdes and Margaret Montoya, our friend and colleague Tayyab Mahmud (Seattle University School of Law) also attended the first annual Margaret Montoya Legal Scholarship Retreat at Campo Sano in Central Florida. Here are a few things we learned … Continue reading →