Standards of proof, political morality, and cost of error: The inconsistent core of Larry Laudan's Legal epistemology

Abstract

This article makes explicit a braid of inconsistencies rising from three argumentative lines that Larry Laudan defends along his thought regarding legal proof. First, Laudan's argument criticizing Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (BARD) formula as an extremally subjective criterion of proof is reconstructed. Second, the article underlines some of his arguments to claim that BARD produces a huge quantity of guilty defendant's acquittals. Third, Laudan's conception of genuine standards of proof is taken into consideration. After showing an apparent inconsistency between Laudan's first and second line of criticism, the paper shows that Laudan's proposal fails, in part given his own arguments against BARD. A different direction of solutions will be suggested.