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\"In 1984, the Sexual Assault Evidence Kit (SAEK) was dubbed \"Ontario's most successful rapist trap.\" Since then, the kit has become the key source of evidence in the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault as well as a symbol of victims' improved access to care and justice. Unfortunately, the SAEK has failed to live up to these promises. The Technoscientific Witness of Rape is the first book to chart the thirty year history of the sexual assault evidence kit and its role in a criminal justice system that re-victimizes many assault victims in their quest for medical treatment and justice. Drawing on actor-network theory and feminist technology studies, Andrea Quinlan combs through sixty-two interviews with police, nurses, scientists, and lawyers, as well as archival records and legal cases to trace changes in sexual assault forensics, law, advocacy, and anti-violence activism in Ontario. Through this history Quinlan bravely and provocatively argues that the SAEK reflects and reinforces the criminal justice system's distrust of sexual assault victims.\"-- Provided by publisher.

The aim of this paper is to show that the meaning and significance of legal evidence is being constituted throughout the course of a singular instance of legal proceedings. This is to be achieved by describing what legal agents do while appealing to different propositions of fact and inferring from them throughout the course of legal proceedings. The authors claim that the process of applying the law is ultimately rooted in the inferential discursive practices of exchanging reasons on the part of the participants of legal proceedings. Therefore, they set forth a model of legal proceedings that consists of an interplay between three types of reasons, which are exchanged by the participants of legal proceedings: i.e. legal reasons, epistemic reasons and stake reasons. To illustrate this interplay, the authors deploy a metaphor of law as a game, and provide a description of legal proceedings as a particular instance of playing a game of law. The conclusion is that the legal concept of evidence is (at least in part) constituted by the role that evidence plays in affecting which reasons for action the participants to legal proceedings choose to act on. The other final assumption of this paper is metatheoretical: authors want to show that when analyzing what legal evidence is, one should begin from the perspective of a singular instance of legal proceedings, rather than from the perspective of law in general.

la antropología forense se ha convertido en elemento de apoyo al sistema de administración de justicia y a la acción forense humanitaria. Aporta con sus conocimientos especializados a las distintas etapas y procedimientos de la investigación judicial, así como al trabajo humanitario. Una de sus contribuciones en específico se realiza en la fase de análisis de laboratorio, donde el antropólogo forense a través de sus conocimientos científicos (p. ej. osteología humana) aporta al proceso de identificación y al establecimiento de la manera y causa de muerte. Sin embargo, en Colombia esta labor del antropólogo forense se encuentra en el marco de la necropsia medicolegal e incluso inmersa en ella, por lo que sus alcances y objetivos tienden a ser invisibilizados en la investigación de las muertes. Por lo tanto, en el presente artículo, se reflexiona sobre la relación existente entre antropología forense y la necropsia medicolegal. Para hacerlo, primero, se lleva a cabo una valoración del contexto actual de la búsqueda e identificación de personas desaparecidas, luego, se determina cómo se articulan la necropsia medicolegal y la labor antropológica en el contexto legal y, por último, se presenta una discusión sobre la relación existente entre teoría y práctica en el análisis antropológico forense. Por consiguiente, este artículo expone los retos que tiene la disciplina, como el fortalecimiento de su fundamentación teórico-científica y la actualización de estándares y/o procedimientos en los que se fusiona la necropsia con la antropología forense. Esto con el fin de visibilizar sus alcances y objetivos, el rol del antropólogo en la fase de análisis y la importancia de sus hallazgos en contexto legal. El artículo invita a otros investigadores a profundizar en los temas discutidos en esta reflexión y contribuye a la discusión respecto al fortalecimiento de la disciplina en su base científica y frente a su relación con la academia.

This Article argues that there is very good reason to believe that the misshapen stone should indeed be extracted and that the result would be a considerably less grotesque structure. There is abundant empirical evidence that prior criminal convictions weigh heavily in jurors' decisions about acquittal and conviction. That same empirical work suggests that jurors' learning directly through the evidence that defendant has been convicted of prior crimes makes very little difference to conviction rates. This seeming paradox is examined in considerable detail. Understanding how and why it arises suggests that the tendency in American law to suppress information about prior crimes (except under special circumstances) is a self-defeating strategy that not only lacks a convincing epistemic foundation but may also be responsible for the inadvertent conviction of innocent defendants. Arguably, it is often not the admission of prior crimes evidence that is unfairly prejudicial so much as its exclusion.

A fundamental divide exists between what scientists do as scientists and what courts often ask them to do as expert witnesses. Whereas scientists almost invariably inquire into phenomena at the group level, trial courts typically need to resolve cases at the individual level. In short, scientists generalize while courts particularize. A basic challenge for trial courts that rely on scientific experts, therefore, concerns determining whether and how scientific knowledge derived from studying groups can be helpful in the individual cases before them (what this Article refers to as \"G2i\"). To aid in dealing with this challenge, this Article proposes a distinction between two types of expert evidence: framework evidence that describes general scientific propositions and diagnostic evidence that applies the general propositions to individual cases. It then examines the evidentiary implications of that distinction. Most importantly, admissibility standards for expert testimony should differ depending on whether experts are proffering framework or diagnostic evidence. Judicial analysis of \"fit,\" expert qualifications, testability, error rates, peer review, general acceptance, helpfulness, and other traditional admissibility criteria for expert evidence will often vary, sometimes significantly, based on this distinction. The Article provides general guidelines about the best practices judges should follow in sorting through these considerations. These guidelines will permit courts to manage G2i inferences in a more informed and coherent way than they do currently.

Enoch et al accommodate the distinction between statistical and individual evidence. In the relevantly paradigmatic cases statistical evidence is epistemically inferior to individual evidence, such attempts can show, for instance, that statistical evidence never justifies belief, or that it is harder for statistical evidence than it is for individual evidence to do so, or that individual evidence can sometimes suffice--and statistical evidence cannot--for being entitled to hold on to a belief or warranted in having a certain degree of confidence, or that individual evidence can support knowledge, but statistical evidence cannot.

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using US state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as relative school quality improvements, suggest that this assumption may fail to hold. Across a number of outcomes including wages, unemployment, and divorce, we find that statistically significant causal estimates become insignificant and, in many instances, wrong-signed when allowing year of birth effects to vary across regions.

This article reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police, imprisonment, and capital punishment and additionally summarizes knowledge of sanction risk perceptions. Studies of changes in police presence, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment provide no useful information on the topic. Four high-priority areas for future research are identified: developing and testing an integrated model of the effects of the threat and experience of punishment, measuring perceptions of sanction regimes, developing and testing a theory of criminal opportunities, and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences and identifying high-deterrence policies.

The burden of proof is a central feature of all systems of adjudication, yet one that has been subject to little normative analysis. This Article examines how strong evidence should have to be in order to assign liability when the objective is to maximize social welfare. In basic settings, there is a tradeoff between deterrence benefits and chilling costs, and the optimal proof requirement is determined by factors that are almost entirely distinct from those underlying the preponderance of the evidence rule and other traditional standards. As a consequence, these familiar burden of proof rules have some surprising properties, as do alternative criteria that have been advanced. The Article also considers how setting the proof burden interacts with other features of legal system design: the determination of enforcement effort, the level of sanctions, and the degree of accuracy of adjudication. It compares and contrasts a variety of legal environments and methods of enforcement, explaining how the appropriate proof requirements differ qualitatively across contexts. Most of the questions raised and answers presented differ in kind — as well as in result — from those in prior literature.

La tesis planteada en el presente artículo mantiene la plena validez del metadato como elemento de validación de los documentos en los nuevos soportes y formatos digitales actuales, del mismo modo que la Diplomática -en cuanto a ciencia del documento- se servía, como hoy, de unos elementos de validación documental que los hacían y hacen auténticos e indubitados en soportes físicos como el pergamino o el papel. De ahí que tracemos aquí una breve evolución del sistema de validación documental a partir de la Edad Media, para demostrar que el documento considerado auténtico era lo que decía ser, con el fin de poner en conexión esos tradicionales elementos de validación con los elementos actuales, a través de los metadatos, con idéntica funcionalidad de garantizar la integridad y fiabilidad de los modernos documentos digitales. Para ello, nos acercamos primeramente a los documentos en soporte físico a través del análisis de sus suscripciones, signos, monogramas, ruedas, signaturas y sellos. Posteriormente,como contribución a lo que podíamos denominar e-Diplomática, valoramos las formas digitales de validación, que se produce a través de los metadatos de la gestión de los e-documentos, acercándonos al origen de su legitimidad como elementos que avalan que sean auténticos, disponibles y fiables.Abstract: The thesis proposed in this article maintains the full validity of metadata as an element of validation of documents in the new digital media and formats of today, in the same way that Diplomacy -as far as the science of the document- used, as today, elements of documentary validation that made them and make them authentic and indubitable in physical supports such as parchment or paper. This is why we trace here a brief evolution of the document validation system from the Middle Ages, to demonstrate that the document considered authentic was what it claimed to be, in order to connect these traditional elements of validation with current elements, through metadata, with the same functionality of guaranteeing the integrity and reliability of modern digital documents. To this end, we first approach documents on physical support through the analysis of their subscriptions, signs, monograms, wheels, signatures and seals. Subsequently, as a contribution to what we could call e-Diplomatic, we valued the digital forms of validation, which are produced through the metadata of the management of e-documents, approaching the origin of their legitimacy as elements that guarantee that they are authentic, available and reliable.