A holistic approach to the examination and analysis of evidence in Anglo-American judicial processes

This thesis is divided into three parts. Part I provides a critique of the dominant approach to the analysis and examination of evidence in Anglo-American writings. The critique consists in showing that the dominant approach, on account of its atomism, does not capture the complexity of judicial fact-finding tasks or codify intuitive judgments about them. Recent attempts offering either mathematical or inductivist structures for the analysis of judicial evidence are explained and criticized as a resurgence of interest in atomistic analysis. Part III identifies a non-atomistic body of thought outside the mainstream of the dominant tradition. This body of thought is used as the starting-point for developing a holistic approach to the examination and analysis of evidence in Anglo-American judicial processes