I couldn't ignore this, as I'm personally involved. In our region, proof and evidence are handled by "procedural law." It's typically codified and constitutes a set of norms governing law enforcement. For example, there's "civil law"—a set of substantive norms, rules, imperatives, or discretionary provisions—and "civil procedural law," which primarily regulates the activities of courts and other law enforcement institutions in this area.

In your post, you touch on a key aspect of procedural law—the institution of proof and evidence. Since we're dealing with practical legal philosophy, there's no room for ambiguity in definitions.

So, let's assume there is some "objective truth." It has nothing in common with "truth established by a court," since the court establishes its truth based on properly "obtained information about facts," i.e., evidence.

No piece of evidence has a predetermined weight in court: you can record anything you want in your ledgers a thousand times, but if something is presented that contradicts all those entries, it won't give you an advantage.

It's important to always remember that the law enforcement agency (e.g., the court) does not have the right to independently establish "objective truth," as this would violate the principle of adversarial proceedings.

It's also crucial not to confuse the concepts of "epistemology" (from philosophy) and "establishing circumstances relevant to the case" (e.g., by the court). These are interconnected concepts, and a judge, of course, uses epistemological methods when making a decision or evaluating evidence. But the law clearly states: the court evaluates evidence legally based on its internal convictions (which have no strict criteria).

The law itself is not a reflection of the world order, but rather the consensus of society (or the ruling elite, or an external mentor). The law has nothing to do with justice, the pursuit of happiness, or the achievement of the good. Law is simply a tool (this is actually a very broad topic, and is the subject of "legal philosophy"). Therefore, attempting to understand law enforcement through (civil) philosophy can lead astray.

I largely agree, but I’m not sure how to take your post in relation to my initial one.

In life, accounting, or law, truth is constructed and is, to the extent it is captured in symbols and their relations, representational. Accounting constitutes its own epistemic frame (with its own subtypes). The same is true of law. So when an accounting like concept is discussed in the legal context, we have a shifting of epistemic frames. The tension I am highlighting is that the warrant for assent to a proposition is not the same between the two contexts (even if individual exercises of judgment result in the same conclusion). Furthermore, because the over arching domains of concern are different, judgments in the respective domains are not even intended to necessarily represent the same type of conclusions.

Consider the idea of materiality in accounting. For this purpose I will sum it up as “does knowledge of this particular financial/economic information matter to the user of the accounting product being created?” In many cases, actual economic transactions are deemed immaterial and the level of evidence required for establishing them is basically non-existent. Compare that general disposition with the more rarified case of fraud - each transaction (recorded or not) is of concern and so every transaction is subject to heightened evidential requirements. (As limited by scope, of course).

From a philosophical perspective, we are dealing with applied epistemology and “truth preservation” between domains. I am choosing to focus on a particular presentation of that issue - the universal gap between map and territory (with some semiotic flare) and how each domain’s struggle with that gap informs how the domains should understand any judgements arising therein (with focus on lawyer understanding the accountant because the class is for lawyers).

Facts in law are always contingent and an “objectively wrong” decision can stand even if everyone knows at the time the decision is made that the decision fails to comport with “objective truth”. While the internal considerations of the fact finder (judge or jury) are frequently unavailable to us, that doesn’t mean that the system itself isn’t constructed upon a particular epistemic system or that the system itself doesn’t give authoritative judgments about what does or does not count as sufficient warrant (see summary judgment motions and the like for instances where certain sorts of evidence mandate a finding of fact one way or another). Also, while we don’t necessarily see many examples of appellate courts questioning the judgment of a judge (in their fact finding capacity) in accepting one alleged fact over another based upon the credibility of the witnesses, we frequently see instances where the appellate court says that a particular fact or set of facts is insufficient warrant for a particular judgment.

For what it is worth, the first time I can remember being introduced to semiotics was in law school, not in my philosophy studies.


P.S. A judge’s contemporary responsibility for properly gate keeping and/or understanding expert testimony is evolving and judge directed questioning more frequent than most would suspect.

Throw in some whereas(es) and a few "now be it, therefore(s) and it's perfect. Present it to your students in the fine print and remind them they must read the fine print.

Very clearly a joke, yes.