Pardo, Michael S. "Review of Doug Walton's WITNESS TESTIMONY EVIDENCE." NDPR (November 2008).

Walton, Doug. Witness Testimony Evidence: Argumentation, Artificial Intelligence, and Law. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Understanding the epistemology of witness testimony is tremendously important for the law. In any legal order, a significant degree of factual accuracy is a necessary condition for just legal judgments, and witness testimony (whether in oral or written form) provides a major -- indeed, often the most important -- class of evidence on which such judgments depend. For these reasons, evidence scholars in law devote attention to the epistemology of the legal proof in general and the role of testimony in particular. A major theme of this scholarly focus has been the extent to which aspects of the proof process can and ought to be formalized. The attempts at formalization typically have appealed to probability theory, often presenting Bayesian models of (1) the proof structure as a whole, (2) aspects of it such as burdens of proof and decision standards, or (3) the probative value of masses or individual items of evidence. Although these models have contributed greatly to understanding some aspects of juridical proof, they have been shown to suffer from deep problems from descriptive, explanatory, analytical, and normative perspectives. Given these limitations, interests have shifted toward other theoretical ways to understand the process and other ways to model it. Douglas Walton's book, Witness Testimony Evidence, is an example of this trend. Focusing primarily on the Anglo-American trial system, the book looks to logic, argumentation theory, formal dialectical models, and artificial intelligence to "understand the structure of witness testimony as a form of evidence in law" (1). It analyzes and evaluates this structure with the aid of formal systems that diagram the inferential relationships between testimonial assertions and the conclusions they are intended to support (in this sense, they are computerized methods similar to one developed in the early Twentieth Century by the great evidence scholar John Henry Wigmore). Although the book discusses the common epistemic problems that can arise with witness testimony, it ultimately defends the trial's reliance on this form of evidence as rational and justified. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14625.