Review: Evidence and Inference in History and Law: Interdisciplinary Dialogues
| Author | Henrik Zahle |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.8.3.211.40867 |
| Published date | 01 July 2004 |
| Date | 01 July 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF 211
REVIEWS
William Twining and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds)
EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE IN HISTORY AND LAW: INTERDISCIPLINARY
DIALOGUES
Illinois: Northwestern University Press (2003) 354pp, hb $89.95, pb $29.95
The celebrated American jurist John Henry Wigmore (1863–1943) wrote extensively
on the (United States) law of evidence. His monumental Treatise on the Anglo-
American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law (‘Wigmore on Evidence’) became a
primary point of reference in courtroom and classroom, yet his pioneering
explorations of inference, fact-finding, and proof more or less passed into oblivion.
Towards the end of the 20th century, however, Wigmore’s interest in the science
of proof was revived. In the 1980s William Twining reintroduced Wigmorean
thinking to new generations of students and scholars, and others followed up
with comprehensive studies. It is in this expansive spirit that the book under
review should be considered.
This book is the result of an interdisciplinary seminar which took place at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies 1994–95 (the way to publication is
often long and thorny). The purpose of the seminar, and of the book, is to uncover
interdisciplinary differences and similarities in inferential methodologies across
selected historical disciplines. The book contains six exploratory historical studies
which analyse themes as different as: the proof in a murder case in 1923, by
Twining and Weis (literature); the time of death of cuneiform writing, by Geller
(semitic languages); early modern theatre iconography, by Katritzky (theatre
studies); Schubert’s possible assent to transcriptions of pieces for piano and guitar,
by Heck (performing arts); an unhappy incident in Dutch colonial labour
management in Sumatra, by Houben (history); and, finally, conflicting
understandings of Locke’s theory of property, by Hampsher-Monk (political
theory).
These studies raise questions about what really happened in different historical
periods, they enlighten these historical questions with various types of evidence,
and they assess the value of the evidence and present their answers with varying
degrees of certainty. Evidentiary inferences are in focus in all the essays, and are
further enlightened by commentary, especially by the introductory remarks of
Schum, Twining and Geller. There are, of course, important differences in the
character of the evidentiary assessments in these various studies, in their more
or less categorical definition of the fact(s) which are to be assumed or rejected,
and in the organisation of often contradictory or inconclusive evidence. According
to Schum, one perspective on all these various types of evidentiary problems has
been to look for a ‘substance-blind categorisation of evidence’ (p. 14). Schum finds
that the ‘particular masses of evidence [in the six cases] have ... common
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