Name: The Origins of Reasonable Doubt
ISBN: 9780300116007

The Origins of Reasonable Doubt

"To be convicted of a crime in the United States. a person must be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt." But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of "reasonable doubt." It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one." "The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not "reasonable." Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice."--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

throw0101cApr 2024

> You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]

You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18740986-inventing-the-i...

This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:

* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo562094...

See also Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial for an interesting run-down on that topic:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_of_R...

> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.

And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:

> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Roman_Emp...

The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).

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throw0101aDec 2021

The medieval origins of the legal profession: canonists, civilians, and courts by Brundage

The origins of reasonable doubt: theological roots of the criminal trial by Whitman

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