Kevin M. Clermont – författare

This book reframes the fundamentals of decisionmaking under uncertainty. For almost a century, theorists have spoken of truth-finding in terms of probability. They have said things like some past fact was 51% certain or proclaimed that in a civil dispute a fact must be shown to exceed a 50% likelihood. But such talk is a misleading misconception. The reason is that traditional probability fails to distinguish epistemic uncertainty from aleatory uncertainty. This conflation leads to mistakes such as invoking probability’s product rules, which calculate a conjunction’s likelihood as being low. From there, the theorists have argued that in a myriad of ways, the law violates the probability calculus unforgivably.

Today, other theorists are newly realizing that in large part the law does not deal in probability. They now can defend the way that law has found facts since long before the invention of probability and on to the present. They are also reevaluating such intuitive practices as those that humans use in daily life to combine inferences upon inferences. A hotly contested literature has emerged.

In a significant, comprehensive, and original contribution, this book develops a theoretical justification for the intuitive approaches that humans deploy across a broad range of decisionmaking. Instead of probability, the book focuses on degrees of belief that estimate, given the state of the evidence, how far a proposition has been fully proven. Instead of combining findings by the rules of probability, the book uses the rules of multivalent logic. The aim is to illuminate decisionmaking outside statistical analysis, showing that our ancient wisdom is in fact theoretically solid. The target is everyone interested in improving decisionmaking.

The papers in this volume address the provisions of the 1999 Hague Jurisdiction and Judgments Draft Convention and the state of the negotiations as of the summer of 2000. They were presented at the symposium "A Global Law of Jurisdiction and Judgments: Lessons from The Hague", held in July 2000 at the Centre Panthéon (University of Paris I Law Faculty) as a part of the Cornell-Paris I Summer Institute of International and Comparative Law.

Part I focuses on the jurisdiction provisions of the 1999 Draft Convention. For the most part, the papers in Part I1 look to the future, though they also deal briefly with the judgments provisions of the 1999 Draft. One paper takes up changes in European Union law that will significantly affect future negotiations concerning the Draft Convention. The other two offer analyses of the major hurdles blocking the way to a successful convention and proposals for vaulting those hurdles. At the beginning of each of the two Parts a brief commentary on the papers presented in each Part is also included.

This volume provides critical analyses of the Draft Convention and should appeal to any private international lawyer.