• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    The Origins of "Reasonable Doubt"

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    0-Whitman__Origins_of_Reasonab ...
    Size:
    890.0Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    Whitman__Origins_of_Reasonable ...
    Size:
    892.6Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Whitman, James
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/185
    Abstract
    The "reasonable doubt" rule is notoriously difficult to define, and many judges and scholars have deplored the confusion it creates in the minds of jurors. Yet "reasonable doubt" is regarded as a fundamental part of our law. How can a rule of such fundamental importance be so difficult to define and understand? The answer, this paper tries to show, lies in history. The "reasonable doubt" rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation. Convicting an innocent defendant was regarded, in the older Christian tradition, as a potential mortal sin. The purpose of the "reasonable doubt" instruction was to address this frightening possibility, reassuring jurors that they could convict the defendant without risking their own salvation, as long as their doubts about guilt were not "reasonable." In its original form, the rule thus had nothing to do with maintaining the rule of law in the sense that we use the phrase, and nothing like the relationship we imagine to the values of liberty. This helps explain why our law is in a state of such disquieting confusion today. We are asking the "reasonable doubt" standard to serve a function that it was not originally designed to serve, and it does its work predictably badly. The paper offers a detailed account of the Christian moral theology of doubt, and a reinterpretation of the development of jury trial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also includes a discussion of an important jurisprudential distinction: the distinction between proof procedures and what the paper calls "moral comfort" procedures. Without a proper comprehension of this distinction, we cannot understand the original significance of "reasonable doubt," or more broadly the structure of pre-modern law.
    Collections
    Faculty Scholarship Series

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.