Justice, Truth, and Proof: Not So Simple, After All

The Faculty of Law and the Department of Philosophy welcome Dr Susan Haack, Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Miami, for a Legal Theory Workshop.

Abstract

Jeremy Bentham writes of “Injustice, and her handmaid, Falsehood”; and the metaphor rings true. Substantive justice is possible only if there is such a thing as factual truth; if such truth is objective, not simply a matter of what anyone, or everyone, believes; and if it is often enough possible for us to figure out what the truth of a disputed matter of fact is. This last point in turn requires that there be objective standards of better and worse evidence; and that the fact that the evidence with respect to a claim is, by these standards, good be at least a fallible indication of the likely truth of the claim in question. Unless these presuppositions are true, the whole idea of legal proof-procedures would be a kind of cruel farce. Even if these assumptions are true, however, if legal proof-procedures are to be more than judicial theater they need to be capable of arriving, often enough, at factually correct verdicts.

In the first part of her lecture, Prof. Haack argues that these presuppositions are indeed true; in the second part, however, as she explores the competence of common-law evidentiary procedures to produce true verdicts and briefly contrasts them with civil-law procedures, she expresses doubt that, in practice, they succeed as often as we would like.

About the speaker

Susan Haack (B.A., M.A., B.Phil., Oxford; Ph.D., Cambridge) is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. She teaches both in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the School of Law.

Her work ranges from philosophy of logic and language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, Pragmatism—both philosophical and legal—and the law of evidence, especially scientific evidence, to social philosophy, feminism, and philosophy of literature.