Go to Home Page for Fact Investigation Course
What happened?
?
What do you think might have happened?
Reading
Materials for
Fact Investigation
Cardozo Law School
Professor Peter
Tillers
Course Materials
The principal required texts for this course are the following:
Peter Tillers & David Schum, "A Theory of Preliminary Fact Investigation," 24 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 931 (1991)
The following texts are recommended:
John R. Josephson & Susan G. Josephson, ABDUCTIVE INFERENCE: Computation, Philosophy, Technology Chapter 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Investigation teams will be required to submit investigation reports at the end of the semester. These reports will summarize the results of the teams' investigations. For an excellent (but not perfect) example of an investigation report see THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT: FINAL REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES (Authorized Edition, Norton & Co., 2004). I recommend that students purchase a copy of this report and read it.
Of Inference, Deduction, Induction,
and Abduction (Retroduction)
Abduction -- the imaginative formation of possibilities or hypotheses -- plays an important part in exploratory fact investigation. See the following web page for a concise and useful encyclopedia entry about "abduction":
The following books are available in the law library:
Terence Anderson & William Twining, ANALYSIS OF EVIDENCE (Little, Brown & Co., 1991; paperback ed.,, Northwestern U. Press, 1998)
Terence Anderson, David Schum & William Twining, ANALYSIS OF EVIDENCE (Cambridge University Press, 2d ed., 2005)
D. Binder & P. Bergman, FACT INVESTIGATION: FROM HYPOTHESIS TO PROOF (1984)
D. Binder, A. Moore & P. Bergman, DEPOSITION QUESTIONING STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES (2001)
R. Lawrence Dessem, PRETRIAL LITIGATION: LAW, POLICY, AND PRACTICE (West, 3d ed., 2001 [or any other edition])
Umberto Eco & Thomas Sebeok, eds., THE SIGN OF THREE: DUPIN, HOLMES, PEIRCE, (Indiana U. Press, 1983, 1988)
James Franklin, THE SCIENCE OF CONJECTURE: EVIDENCE AND PROBABILITY before PASCAL (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
Reid Hastie, Steven Penrod & Nancy Pennington, INSIDE THE JURY (1983)
R. Haydock, D. Herr & J. Stempel, FUNDAMENTALS OF PRETRIAL LITIGATION (West Group, 5th ed., 2001 [or any other edition])
Morton M. Hunt, THE MUGGING (1972)
John Josephson & Susan Josephson, ABDUCTIVE INFERENCE: COMPUTATION, PHILOSOPHY, TECHNOLOGY (Cambridge U. Press, 1994)
Joseph Kadane & David Schum, A PROBABILISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE SACCO AND VANZETTI EVIDENCE (Wiley, 1996)
Arthur Koestler, THE ACT OF CREATION (Reissue edition, 1990)
Thomas Mauet, PRETRIAL (Aspen Law & Business, 3d ed., 1995 [or any other edition])
Peter Ohrstrom & Per F. V. Hasle, TEMPORAL LOGIC: FROM ANCIENT IDEAS TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995)
Karl Popper, CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS: THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE (Basic Books, 1962)
Bernard Robertson & G.A. Vignaux, INTERPRETING EVIDENCE (Wiley, 1995)
David Schum, EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE FOR THE INTELLIGENCE ANALYST (2 vols., University Press of America, 1987)
David Schum, EVIDENTIAL FOUNDATIONS OF PROBABILISTIC REASONING (Wylie, 1994)
Glenn Shafer, THE ART OF CAUSAL CONJECTURE (MIT Press, 1996)
Peter Tillers, guest editor, Special Issue on Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings, 6 Law, Probability and Risk Nos. 1-4 (2007)
Douglas N. Walton, LEGAL ARGUMENTATION AND EVIDENCE (2002) (on order by Cardozo law library)
Charles L. Yeschke, THE ART OF INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING: A HUMAN APPROACH TO TESTIMONIAL EVIDENCE (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997)
(with advance apologies for the overemphasis on (i) criminal investigation and (ii) science in investigation)
Investigation Process Research Roundtable
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation
Psychiatric Society for Informatics
Andrew Palmer's Course on Proof in Litigation