This extensively revised second edition is a rigorous introduction to the construction and criticism of arguments about questions of fact, and to the marshalling and evaluation of evidence at all stages of litigation. It covers the principles underlying the logic of proof; the uses and dangers of story-telling; standards for decision and the relationship between probabilities and proof; the chart method and other methods of analyzing and ordering evidence in fact-investigation, in preparing for trial, and in connection with other important decisions in legal processes and in criminal investigation and intelligence analysis. Most of the chapters in this new edition have been rewritten; the treatment of fact investigation, probabilities and narrative has been extended; and new examples and exercises have been added. Designed as a flexible tool for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on evidence and proof, students, practitioners and teachers alike will find this book challenging but rewarding.

This paper reports observations from a series of formal and empirical studies of the process of assessing the probative value of evidence in the cascaded or hierarchical inference tasks commonly performed by fact finders in court trials. The formal research develops expressions that prescribe how the ingredients of various forms of evidence can be coherently combined in assessing the probative value of evidence. These expressions allow identification and systematic analysis of a wide assortment of subtle properties of evidence, many of which are commonly recognized in evidence law. The reported empirical research was designed to evaluate the consistency with which persons actually assess the probative value of evidence when they are asked to make these evaluations in several equivalent ways. Results show that persons, when required to mentally combine a large amount of probabilistic evidence, exhibit certain inconsistencies such as treating contradictory testimony as corroborative testimony and double-counting or overvaluing redundant testimony. However, when people are asked to make assessments about the fine-grained logical details of the same evidence, these inconsistencies do not occur.

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