Larry Laudan, the pursuit of truth, and the meaninglessness of burdens of persuasion

Resumen

Inspired by the work of Larry Laudan, the meaninglessness of current conventional understandings and discussions of burdens of persuasion is demonstrated. The conventional view is that burdens of persuasion are a mechanism to fine tune error distribution at trial. To the contrary, it is demonstrated that one can have no idea what the effect will be of any instruction to the jury or direction to the trial judge on burdens of persuasion but ironically one knows to certainty that those effects will differ country to country, state to state, and event courtroom to courtroom.