Before Hohfeld, legal insiders felt that the law was secondary personal in all its operations. After Hohfeld, they knew. Hohfeld`s schema of legal antagonisms and correlations revealed analytical evidence that every legal claim ultimately turns into a person`s right or absence to use state authority to compel another person to act or refrain from acting. This requirement stems from the right to autonomy enjoyed by every individual in a free society. Under autonomy, a person becomes responsible for his or her actions only if he abuses his or her autonomy by violating the autonomy of another person or group of persons – that is, when he or she commits a crime or misdemeanour or fails to perform a contract, thereby causing harm to another person or to society as a whole. Therefore, the evidence that can prove any of these injustices must show what the person actually did and did not do and what happened to the victim of the alleged wrongdoing. In order to satisfy this basic requirement, the evidence against the alleged perpetrator must be subject to maximum individual examination: it cannot be purely statistical; And it should also allow individuals to determine whether this applies to the case in court. This condition should also benefit the victim of the alleged misconduct, i.e. the rightholder who claims to be legally entitled to impose a penalty, compensation or other remedy on the alleged offender. The evidence to refute the allegations of the purported right holder must relate only to its interactions with the defendant; And it must also be fully open to review to determine its case-specific impact. This dual requirement defines the modus operandi of the Anglo-American system of evidence. In particular, it explains and justifies the operation of the burden of proof doctrine, the rule prohibiting naked statistical evidence and the rules for the admission of hearsay and moral evidence.
This book systematically examines the underlying theory of evidence in Anglo-American legal systems and identifies the defining characteristics of judicial facts. Stein develops a detailed innovative theory that sets aside the traditional view of the law of evidence as a facilitation of the search for truth. Combining probability theory, epistemology, economic analysis, and moral philosophy, he argues instead that the fundamental purpose of the law of evidence is to divide the risk of error under conditions of uncertainty. This article is the first to systematically examine the standard rule and compromise in private orders. The article accomplishes this task by identifying and analyzing fundamental asymmetries between the contractual rule and the contractual rule. The standard compromise and the parallel compromise that takes place in legislation. The two trade-offs differ in three fundamental ways: (1) contractual norms, unlike legal norms, do not gradually transform into rules over time; (2) The vagueness of norms at the beginning of contractual relations allows the parties to generate and realize the benefits of mutual trust and collaborative learning – an advantage that never exists in legal norms; and (3) the application of contractual rules and standards does not lead to a linear aggregation of social protection, but to a strategic exchange that takes into account the benefits of all parties. The compromise between clear rules and general standards is one of the foundations of legal design. This compromise determines the composition of legal norms. The trade-off between rules and standards also has an omnipresent effect on private ordering: it determines the composition of contractual standards.
Yet scholars studying the dichotomy between rule and norm have either completely neglected the trade-off that takes place in private commissions, or equated it with the public compromise that dominates legislation. This article critically examines the entrenchment of mind-body dualism in Supreme Court doctrines of prejudice, coercion, and intentionality. He uses new ideas from neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to expose dualism as empirically flawed and conceptually bankrupt. We show how the fiction of dualism distorts the law and why the most plausible reasons for the persistence of dualism cannot save it. We present an integrationist model of human action and experience that defines the conditions under which the harmful influence of dualism in our legal system can be uprooted.
