Emily Spottswood

Visiting Professor of Law

Professor Emily Spottswood focuses her research on the process of fact-finding in courts, including issues in evidence law, jury decision-making, the structure of trials, and pre-trial procedure. One strand of her recent work focuses on probabilistic reasoning and the optimal structure of burdens of proof, arguing that varying sanctions continuously in response to varying levels of confidence in guilt has a number of important advantages relative to the all-or-nothing approach that presently predominates in our trial process. In other work, she has drawn attention to a number of structural biases in the design of jury trials, including problems that may stem from default approaches to the ordering of evidence as well as the suboptimality of standard jury instructions concerning conjunctive and disjunctive reasoning. She is currently writing a book on the law’s failure to adequately account for the malleability of human memories in the design of our litigation systems, the substantial risks of erroneous trial outcomes that may arise due to that failure, and some realistic reforms that could help us do better. While visiting at Penn State Dickinson Law, she will be teaching Criminal Law and Evidence.

Select Publications by Professor Spottswood

“Burdens of Proof,” in Philosophical Foundations of Evidence Law (Christian Dahlman, Alex Stein & Giovanni Tuzet, editors) (Oxford University Press 2021)

“Paradoxes of Proof,” in Philosophical Foundations of Evidence Law (Christian Dahlman, Alex Stein & Giovanni Tuzet, editors) (Oxford University Press 2021)

“Continuous Burdens of Proof,” 21 Nev. L.J. 779 (2021)

“Proof Discontinuities and Civil Settlements,” 22 Theoretical Inquiries in L. 201 (2020)

“On the Limitations of a Unitary Model of the Proof Process,” 23 Int’l J. Evidence & Proof 75 (2019)