Evidence Scholarship Reconsidered: Results of the Interdisciplinary Turn

Abstract

Evidence scholarship has developed a permanent interdisciplinary aspect, involving a variety of different disciplinary themes. These include: the psychology of witnesses and factfinders, forensic science, theories of probability and proof, feminist perspectives on evidence law, and the law and economics perspective. After first assessing the status of traditional doctrinal scholarship, we review each of the major interdisciplinary braids, compare them, and evaluate their relative contributions. We conclude by developing a thesis about the utility of different types of evidence scholarship, arguing that interdisciplinary evidence scholarship is more promising and useful to the extent that it helps to explain or advance the truth-seeking function of trials, rather than to posit or seek extrinsic effects of rules that traditionally have been understood as protecting the accuracy of verdicts.