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KJuris Seminar with Sarah Moss (Michigan)
Title: 'Pragmatic Encroachment and the Law'
Abstract
In most U.S. criminal trials, judges and counsel are prohibited from informing juries of the sentences that a defendant may face if convicted, even in cases where minimum sentences are mandatory. This prohibition is commonly justified on the grounds that informing juries about sentences "would inject irrelevant considerations into the jury’s deliberations as to guilt." In this talk, I argue that this justification is flawed, and that there is a significant epistemological reason for jurors to know the potential consequences of conviction. I begin by introducing a knowledge norm of legal proof. According to this norm, a jury can properly convict a defendant only if they know the defendant is guilty. Second, I argue that in order to be properly guided by this norm, juries must know what is at stake for a criminal defendant if they vote to convict. Just like knowledge, then, our standards of legal proof are subject to pragmatic encroachment.
Speaker biography
Sarah Moss is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her research addresses problems in epistemology, formal semantics, philosophy of mind, and legal philosophy. She was the Thomas E. Sunderland Faculty Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School in 2018-19. Her work in legal philosophy includes "Knowledge and Legal Proof," which won the 2019 Sanders Epistemology Prize, as well as chapter 10 of her book Probabilistic Knowledge (OUP, 2018).