This article argues that legal proof should be tantamount to justified belief of guilt. A defendant should be found guilty just in case it is justified to believe that the defendant is guilty. My notion of justified belief implies a threshold view on which justified belief requires high credence, but mere statistical evidence does not give rise to justified belief.

It has long been said that legislation ought to be knowable: accessible, comprehensible, and so forth. This is often described as an essential element of the rule of law. But in many legal systems, legislation has become so voluminous and complex that few people know its content. Rather than admit that the rule of law has been compromised, some scholars take legislative complexity as a provocation to rethink what the rule of law requires—and conclude that, for various reasons, the rule of law can prevail even if legislation is not reasonably knowable to the people. This article responds to this line of scholarship and defends the orthodox position that the public ought to be able to understand legislation, or at least reasonably so. That is necessary to enable people to plan their lives in a way that properly reflects the role of legislation in contemporary administrative states.

The rich evade conviction more often in criminal trials than the poor. They also win more often in civil cases against the poor. Given that money buys better lawyers and better lawyers are instrumental in winning in adversarial trials, the rich have a structural advantage in laissez-faire trial systems. Such inequality is concerning. In a landmark article, Alan Wertheimer argues that we should level down legal resources in civil cases on the basis that doing so increases the adversarial system’s accuracy—that is, its chance of reaching correct decisions. In a more recent article, along similar lines, Shai Agmon also advocates that, given some constraints of adequacy, legal resources should be leveled down in both civil and criminal cases. This article aims to show that such arguments fail because leveling down legal resources could decrease a trial system’s accuracy, making it worse by Wertheimer’s or Agmon’s own criteria.

Many scholars and judges attempt to harmonize legal practices of contracting with the social practice of promising in ordinary life. This article explores an alternative genealogy of contract in traditional social practices that track many of contract's core norms: taking vows and oaths. Without denying that promissory morality infiltrates modern contract, contract-as-vow-or-oath can expose by way of a supplementary account why some contract rules work as they do and can take some pressure off of a more unitary promissory theory in justifying, explicating, and reforming contract law.

Why should musical compositions and artistic images be included among the types of expression covered by free speech principles? One way to answer this question is to show how expression in nonverbal media can be functionally similar to other types of verbal expression. But this leaves us with an intuitively unsatisfying explanation of why free speech principles cover nonverbal creative expression that does not functionally emulate literal speech. In this article, as an alternative justification, we develop and defend the idea that musical and pictorial expression‚ much like literal speech, can be media through which people think aloud, as opposed to mere tools for the transmission of thought. We use this proposal to provide a more robust justification for including nonverbal creative expression in the scope of free speech coverage, and we outline some of the practical policy implications that come with adopting this justificatory strategy.

Legal experts—lawyers, judges, and academics—typically resist changing their beliefs about what the law is or requires when they encounter disagreement from those committed to different jurisprudential or interpretive theories. William Baude and Ryan Doerfler are among the most prominent proponents of this view, holding it because fundamental differences in methodological commitments severs epistemic peerhood. This dominant approach to disagreement, and Baude and Doerfler’s rationale, are both wrong. The latter is committed to an overly stringent account of epistemic peerhood that dogmatically excludes opponents. The former violates the conjunction of three plausible epistemic principles: Complete Evidence, considering all epistemically permissible evidence; Independence, in which only dispute-independent evidence is epistemically permissible; and Peer Support, which involves epistemically permissible evidence. Instead, I argue for jurisprudential humility—we ought to be more willing to admit we do not know what the law is or requires, and take seriously conflicting views.

In Scotland, for hundreds of years, juries have chosen between three criminal verdicts: “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven.” The “not proven” verdict’s legal meaning remains mysterious. In this article, I aim to describe and solve the problem. Applying modern ideas about standards of proof to the intellectual history of “not proven” yields eight plausible meanings for the verdict. With the extent of the problem in mind, I offer a solution. In the three-verdict system, jurors should deliver a “guilty” verdict when they believe that the accused has committed the crime and a “not guilty” verdict when they believe that the accused has not committed the crime. The “not proven” verdict is for all other states of mind. Clarifying this question matters for determining whether the verdict’s existence is just. It also offers some evidence for how the criminal standard of proof works in other legal systems.

In intersystemic cases, a court applies the law of a foreign system. Scholars have argued that the court ought to use the interpretive methodology of the foreign system’s courts. I argue against that intuitive position. First, interpretive methodology is not bound up with primary rights and duties such that it constitutes substantive law for conflict of laws purposes. Second, although interpretive methodology has epistemic value and may affect case outcomes, a given methodology might not have the same epistemic value or the same effect on outcomes for differently situated interpreters. Further, the approach that the foreign judges take to interpreting their own law is necessarily anchored to the foreign system’s rule of recognition, which is not true of the approach of external judges. Descriptive facts might align such that external interpreters would have to use the internal methodology to identify the applicable law, but that’s an empirical question the answer to which will vary from case to case.

There is a widely held view that legislative intention determines the meaning of a statute. The focus of this article is meaning in the sense of full linguistic content, which may not be the same as legal content. Linguistic intentionalism appears to have its greatest appeal when a statute has a partly implied linguistic meaning. It seems natural to suppose that the part of the meaning that is implied by the explicit wording in the statute is determined by an intention of the legislature—roughly, what the legislature intended to imply. The purpose of this article is to present some new reasons to doubt linguistic intentionalism and to offer an alternative for a particular kind of implied statutory meaning that some philosophers of language call implicitures. Rather than legislative intention, the meaning of implicitures is metaphysically determined by intention-free pragmatic linguistic norms, the grasp of which is part of the language competence of ordinary law subjects. The use of these norms, in combination with certain facts about background social practices and other conventions, generates implicitures that may be inconsistent with actual communicative intentions. These intention-free pragmatic norms, and the implicitures they generate, are explanatorily prior to the fact—if there is such a fact—of what impliciture it is reasonable to infer that the enacting legislature (or the legislators collectively) intended. Reference to legislative linguistic intention (actual or reasonably imputed) is thus explanatorily inert.