Laurence Tribe: Maths on Trial (1)

Who is Laurence Tribe?

Laurence Tribe is the grandfather of all the lawyers who have written scholarly articles on the basic topic of this blog - the use of mathematics in trial situations. Born in 1941, Tribe majored in mathematics as an undergraduate before attending Harvard Law School, and served as a law clerk for two years before joining the faculty of Harvard Law. He has argued many cases in court, of which no less than 34 before the U.S. Supreme Court, and published a number of scholarly articles. Until recently, he was on leave from Harvard to work as "senior counselor for access to justice" in the Justice Department of the Obama administration (he calls Obama "the best student I ever had"). But he resigned from this position, ostensibly for medical and personal reasons, although he was also involved in a vigorous protest against the Obama administration's treatement of Private Bradley Manning of Wikileaks fame.

In my eyes, what makes Tribe outstanding is his contribution to the study of the role of mathematics in trials. By an astonishing coincidence, this former math major was involved in one of the seminal cases in which probability calculations were involved to identify the perpetrators of a robbery (details in our book Maths on Trial), and this perhaps sparked his abiding interest in the subject.

In the spring of 1971, a remarkable article about the use of mathematics in trials was published in the Harvard Law Review by M. Finkelstein and W. Fairley:

A Bayesian Approach to Identification Evidence, by M. Finkelstein and W. Fairley (83 Harvard Law Rev. 489, 1971).

In response, Tribe published the seminal article Trial by Mathematics, Precision and Ritual in the Legal Process, by Laurence Tribe (84 Harvard Law Rev. 1329, 1971).

I propose to investigate the contents of both articles, little by little, and subjectively and not in order. Both, and especially Tribe's, are simply packed with fascinating reflections on the nature of law, justice and the trial system, and the role and dangers of mathematics in that context.

Tribe's article contains a detailed discussion of the dangers of using mathematics (in particular, using them in the way that Finkelstein and Fairley recommend, using Bayes' theorem) in trials in two different ways. The lion's share of the article deals with the use of mathematics to weigh the probability of specific evidence in a specific trial; the second, smaller part concerns his reactions to mathematical models for jury decisions. We’ll go over the main ideas Tribe expresses in a series of upcoming posts.