Abstract
Judges or juries make decisions about the credibility of witnesses, decisions that might send one person to prison for years, strip another of her fortune or deny a parent full access to his children. An on-going judicial research project has been studying how such questions of contested fact are determined in a trial (Seniuk 1994). The project reached out to experts from outside the legal profession to assess what knowledge or insight these other disciplines might shed on this question. For example, knowledge of forensic psychology and what the discipline has learned of credibility assessment and lie detection has greatly assisted this project (see Seniuk and Yuille 1996; ten Brinke and Porter present volume).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Count of papers containing “fuzzy” in the title as compiled by Engineering Library, UC Berkley to October 2005 from INSPEC databases: 1970–1979 = 569; 1980–1989 = 2,404; 1990–1999 = 23,211; October 2000. 2005 = 17,785.
References
Allen, R. J. (1994a). Burdens of proof, uncertainty and ambiguity in modern legal discourse. Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 17, 627–646.
Allen, R. J. (1994b). Factual ambiguity and a theory of evidence. Northwestern Law Review, 88, 604–640.
Allen, R. J., & Seniuk, G. T. G. (1997). Two puzzles of juridical proof. Canadian Bar Review, 76, 65.
Anderson, T., & Twinning, W. (1991). Analysis of evidence. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Ding, H., & Gupta, M. M. (2000). Competitive and cooperative adaptive reasoning with fuzzy causal knowledge. Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, 9, 191–196.
Ekman, P. (1992). Telling lies. New York: W.W. Norton.
Frank, J. (1949). Courts on trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kaufmann, A., & Gupta, M. M. (1985). Introduction to fuzzy arithmetic: Theory and applications. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc.
Polya, G. (1988). Mathematics and plausible reasoning: Patterns of plausible inference (Vol. 2). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
R. v. B. (K.G.) (1948) 7 C.R. 342.
R. v. Belland and Phillips, (1987) 2 S.C.R. 398.
R. v. J.H.S., (2008) SCC 30.
R. v. Lifchus (1997) 5 C.R. (5th) 1 S.C.C.
R. v. Mackenzie (1993) 18 C.R. (4th) 133.
R. v. Presley, (1948) 7 C.R. 342.
R. v. Starr (2001) 36 C.R. (5th) 1.
Seniuk, G. T. G. (1992). Judicial fact-finding and a theory of credit. Saskatchewan Law Review, 56, 79.
Seniuk, G. T. G. (1994). Judicial fact-finding and contradictory witnesses. Criminal Law Quarterly, 37, 70.
Seniuk, G. T. G., & Yuille, J. C. (1996). Fact finding and the judiciary. Saskatoon: Commonwealth of Learning.
Zadeh, L. A. (2004). Fuzzy logic systems: Origin, concepts, and trends. Hong Kong: Paper presented at the Web Intelligence Consortium.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Dr. Madan M. Gupta, University of Saskatchewan, College of Engineering, for explaining fuzzy logic and for guiding the development of the fuzzy logic charts.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Seniuk, G.T.G. (2013). Credibility Assessment, Common Law Trials and Fuzzy Logic. In: Cooper, B., Griesel, D., Ternes, M. (eds) Applied Issues in Investigative Interviewing, Eyewitness Memory, and Credibility Assessment. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5547-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5547-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5546-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5547-9
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)