Law, Probability and Risk: a journal of reasoning under uncertainty.
Call for Papers
Papers are requested for a new journal entitled Law, Probability and
Risk, aimed primarily at academic lawyers, mathematicians and
statisticians. The journal seeks to publish papers that deal with topics
on the interface of law and probabilistic reasoning. These will be
interpreted broadly to include aspects relevant to the interpretation of
scientific evidence, the assessment of uncertainty and the assessment of
risk.
Examples include: evaluation, interpretation and presentation of
evidence, estimation of compensation for serious injuries, the relevance
and reliability of genetic tests for insurance purposes with consequent
considerations of legal or quasi-legal criteria for allowable
discrimination; legal conflicts affecting the efficiency of credit
scoring on the basis of the different types of data permitted to be held
by credit bureaux in the U.K., the U.S. and the rest of Europe; the
detection of fraudulent transactions live, using expert systems and
statistical analyses; the drafting of legislation which is
scientifically sound through the involvement of scientists and
statisticians at this stage of legislation.
Non-evidence law topics include environmental issues, mass torts,
causation, risk assessment, medical and pharmaceutical litigation
involving the evaluation of epidemiological and bio-statistical evidence
according to legal criteria.
The primary objective of the journal will be to cover issues in law
which have a scientific element, with an emphasis on statistical and
probabilistic issues and the assessment of risk. The primary readership
includes academic lawyers interested in cases with a scientific element,
particularly those which include the assessment of data but also
including reasoning under uncertainty more generally, and legislators
interested in drafting legislation which involves the assessment of
uncertainty, such as statutory levels of pollutants in environmental
legislation. The readership also includes statisticians and
probabilists interested in the evaluation, interpretation and
presentation of evidence.
Examples of topics which may be covered include communications law,
computers and the law, environmental law, law and medicine, regulatory
law for science and technology, identification problems (such as DNA but
including other materials), sampling issues (drugs, computer
pornography, fraud), offender profiling, credit scoring, risk
assessment, the role of statistics and probability in drafting
legislation, the assessment of competing theories of evidence (possibly
with a view to forming an optimal combination of them). In addition, a
whole new area is emerging in the application of computers to medicine
and other safety-critical areas. New legislation is required to define
the responsibility of computer experts who develop software for tackling
these safety-critical problems.
Editors:
C.G.G. Aitken (Statistics - University of Edinburgh)
F. Taroni (Forensic Science - University of Lausanne)
P. Tillers (Law - Cardozo School of Law, New York)
M. Redmayne (Law - London School of Economics)
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